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Conclusion

With the proliferation of research in general and scientific research in particular, storing and the
ability to use the data related to research outputs in a meaningful manner has become a challenging
task to manage. By a rough estimate, at present more than two million scholarly documents are
created every year, indicating the enormity of the problem.

• The first step was taken by Eugene Garfield in the 1960s when he created Institute of Scientific
Information (ISI) and defined the citations-based Journal Impact Factor (JIF) as a tool for
evaluating journals, thus laying the foundation of Bibliometrics or Scientometrics. This has
led to creation of academic databases as well as research evaluation metrics. At present there
are large number of databases, both with and without subscriptions, as well as good number of
research evaluation metrics at the journal and the author level.
• Web of Science (WoS), In its present form as maintained by Clarivate Analytics, is the oldest,
as well the most respected platform, which allows one to track scholarly literature across 254
disciplines from almost 171 million records and almost 1.9 billion cited references.
• Scopus, maintained by Elsevier, another universally accepted subscription database, currently
has over 80 million core records, with the oldest record dating back to 1788 with almost 1.5
billion cited references.
• Google Scholar is perhaps the most important subscription-free database, estimated to contain
roughly 390 million documents including articles, citations and patents making it the world’s
largest academic search engine.
• Microsoft Academics is another subscription-free large database, currently indexes over 220
million publications, 88 million of which are journal articles. There are many more databases,
some of these are disciplines specific or are for targeted audience.

For journal articles to be impactful, they have to be discoverable, and online discovery rests almost
entirely on indexing. Journals included in an index are considered to be of higher quality than
journals that are not as these have to go through a vetting process to be included or indexed in reputed
bibliographic databases. Based on the citations, there are several research evaluation metrics for both
journals and authors.

WoS-based Journal Impact Factor is the most popular parameter used for evaluating journals. Simply
stated, it is the average number of citations received in a given year by the articles published in the
journal within a two-year window immediately preceding the year. Besides JIF, several metrics have
come up based on the WoS, for example, Immediacy Index, Five-year Impact Factor, Cited/Citing
Half-Life, throwing light on the various aspects of citations. Recently, similar to JIF, Scopus based IPP
and its replacement CiteScore have also become popular in the literature.
In order to address some of the drawbacks of JIF and related metrics, efforts have been made to
develop new-generation metrics, both using WoS and Scopus databases. These metrics involve
complex algorithm-based calculations for assessing the quality of journals using the vast mesh of
citations. Eigenfactor and Article Influence are based on WoS data, whereas SNIP and SJR indicators
are based on Scopus data. The Eigenfactor Score calculation is based on the number of times articles
from the journal published in the past five years have been cited in the JCR data year, but it also
considers which journals have contributed these citations so that highly cited journals will influence
the network more than lesser cited journals, with self-citations not being considered. Related to the
Eigenfactor score, the Article Influence (AI) score of a journal is a measure of the relative importance
of each of its articles over the first five years after publication.

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