A longitudinal analysis of bibliometric and impact factor trends among the core international journals of nursing, 1977–2008

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Abstract

Background

Although bibliometric analysis affords significant insight into the progression and distribution of information within a particular research field, detailed longitudinal studies of this type are rare within the field of nursing.

Objectives

This study aimed to investigate, from a bibliometric perspective, the progression and trends of core international nursing journals over the longest possible time period.

Methods

A detailed bibliometric analysis was undertaken among 7 core international nursing periodicals using custom historical data sourced from the Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports®.

Results

In the 32 years between 1977 and 2008, the number of citations received by these 7 journals increased over 700%. A sustained and statistically significant (p < 0.001) 3-fold increase was also observed in the average impact factor score during this period. Statistical analysis revealed that all periodicals experienced significant (p < 0.001) improvements in their impact factors over time, with gains ranging from approximately 2- to 78-fold.

Conclusions

Overall, this study provides one of the most comprehensive, longitudinal bibliometric analyses ever conducted in the field of nursing. Impressive and continual impact factor gains suggest that published nursing research is being increasingly seen, heard and cited in the international academic community.

Introduction

It has been suggested that scientific knowledge is communicated to members of a profession via its literature, and as such, journals represent an important method for the dissemination of research findings to nurses (Oermann et al., 2008). Nursing research has developed quickly in recent decades, with the number of scientific nursing periodicals now rapidly increasing (Hallberg, 2009), and journals fast becoming the primary source of information within this field. Bibliometric research and the analysis of nursing periodicals have also become more common as clinicians find it increasingly difficult to keep up to date with the latest research findings to guide their practice (Oermann et al., 2008). Bibliometrics itself evolved from an age-old conundrum of librarians regarding which journals were the most important in each discipline. That is, which journals they should purchase given the seemingly endless number of titles on offer, versus the realities of limited and often declining, budgets (Meadows, 2005), and which journals they should keep.

In the 1950s, a young information scientist named Eugene Garfield created the Science Citation Index® (SCI) as an up-to-date tool to facilitate the dissemination and retrieval of scientific literature (Garfield, 1955). Even with this system the sheer volume of data was still extensive; the project contained over 1 million citations by the early 1960s for example (Garfield and Sher, 1963). The concept of a journal's impact factor was subsequently devised by Garfield and Sher as a means of ranking journals by citation count, rather than by number of publications (Garfield, 2006). This assisted Garfield's company, the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), in deciding which journal titles to include in the SCI, as well as accounting for journals that published a relatively small number of articles but which received a comparatively large number of citations (Garfield, 2007). A by-product of the SCI, the Journal Citation Reports® (JCR) had evolved from the ISI's ranked author list (Garfield, 2006), and was officially launched by the ISI in 1975 (Garfield, 1976).

Although impact factors were largely ignored for many years by most people aside from librarians, information scientists and the occasional journal editor (Brown, 2007), they now occupy a position of great interest and debate among contemporary journals editors, academics and researchers (Smith, 2006). Citations are being increasingly seen as the ‘currency’ of modern science (Joseph, 2003), with the more citations an author receives, the more important their work is assumed to be (Norris and Oppenheim, 2003). With the introduction of schemes such as the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) in the United Kingdom and the more recent Exercise in Research Assessment (ERA) in Australia, the importance of author citations and bibliometric performance has become even more relevant for contemporary academics. This has, in turn, led to increasing interest in bibliometric and other citation-based research in virtually all disciplines. One of the first bibliometric investigations of nursing periodicals was conducted by Garfield himself in the early 1980s using all ‘core’ nursing journals that were, at the time, included in the ISI's databases. Since then, various studies have investigated the content and performance of nursing periodicals from a variety of perspectives.

In 1999, for example, a task force was first established to help ‘map’ the literature in nursing, as part of a larger project to help characterize the literature of allied health fields using a common bibliometric methodology (Schloman, 1999). Nursing literature has also been investigated by region, including in the United Kingdom (Traynor et al., 2001), the United States (Allen and Levy, 2006), Australia (Borbasi et al., 2002, Wilkes et al., 2002), Spain (Pardo et al., 2001) and Taiwan (Huang et al., 2006). In 2009, Crookes and colleagues developed a ranking tool for refereed journals in which nursing and midwifery researchers publish their work (Crookes et al., 2009). Via consultation with experts in the field, the authors developed a novel technique called the Journal Evaluation Tool (JET) which sorted 52 periodicals into four quality bands. A few years earlier than this, the Allen (Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature – CINAHL) Rating System had been developed for nursing journals, one which judged periodicals on content, reputation and frequency of citations (Plohman et al., 2008). Other scholars have used the JCR more broadly as a selection technique when investigating journals. Dougherty et al. (2004) for example, looked at international content in ‘high ranking nursing journals’ by consulting all 42 nursing journals that were listed in the 2000 Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI). Angordans et al. (2009) appear to have gone one step further, by proposing that nursing journals adopt their own model for publication, irrespective of the medical model. Regardless of what nursing journals and academic models a researcher ultimately chooses to analyze the literature, it is clear that bibliometric analysis of this nature provides interesting and relevant information on the progression of academic publishing over time.

Despite this fact, however, no author has ever investigated the bibliometric performance of core nursing journals over a long period of time. While some recent investigations have examined single (Dougherty et al., 2004) and multiple years (Mantzoukas, 2009, Oermann et al., 2008), again, none has focused on longitudinal bibliometric analyses.

Section snippets

Aim

The current study aimed to investigate, from a bibliometric perspective, the longitudinal progression and trends of core international nursing journals for the longest possible period of time.

Journal selection

The age and completeness of data used in the current study were dependent on how long each individual journal had been included in the JCR. Titles selected for inclusion were based on the list of ‘core’ nursing journals originally proposed by Garfield (1984) as follows: the American Journal of Nursing (AJN), the International Journal of Nursing Studies (IJNS), the Journal of Advanced Nursing (JAN), the Journal of Nurse-Midwifery (later to become the Journal of Midwifery & Women's Health)

Results

Fig. 1 displays the trend of average citations received and citable items between 1977 and 2008 among the 7 nursing journals analyzed in this study. In 1977 an average of approximately 360 citations were being received per year, a figure which had risen dramatically to around 2600 per year in 2008, a statistically significant (p < 0.001) increase of approximately 722%. This also meant that each journal was receiving, on average, an increase of approximately 65 extra citations per year. On the

Discussion

This study provides a very comprehensive, longitudinal bibliometric analysis of important journals in the field of nursing. The first major finding was that the number of citations received by nursing journals has been steadily increasing over the past 32 years. There are a few probable reasons for this. Firstly, there is probably a growing awareness of nursing literature, most likely due to the increasing focus on publication and citation that is occurring within virtually all research fields.

Conclusion

This study provides a very comprehensive, longitudinal bibliometric analysis of important journals in the field of nursing. Investigation of the progression and continuing rise of 7 core international nursing journals over a 32-year time period revealed the existence of important bibliometric trends, not the least of which was clear evidence of rapidly rising impact factors in the field of nursing. Results also suggest that journal impact factors will continue to rise in future, thus confirming

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