Domsa Károlyné, Fekete Gézáné, Kovács Mária (szerk.): Gondolatok a könyvtárban / Thoughts in the Library (A MTAK közleményei 30. Budapest, 1992)
KÖNYVTÁR ÉS KORSZERŰSÉG – LIBRARY AND MODERNITY
Braun T. - Schubert A. - Zsindely S. positions in the collective activity of science. Taking into account their vital strategic importance in the orchestration of science it seems interesting to have some quantitative data on the science journal gatekeeping process. We have built a machine readable database on journal gatekeepers. 1 252 international journals were selected from the fields of clinical medicine, biomedical research, biology, chemistry, physics, earth and space sciences, engineering and mathematics. Science journals were considered "international" if their editorial board included scientists from five countries at least, irrespective of the title of the journal in question. (The "International" label in the title of some journals may hide a truly national journal. On the contrary, in the editorial board of, e.g. the American Heart Journal there are, in addition to north Americans, scientists from ten, mostly European countries.) Issues from the first quarter of 1980 of international (in the above sense) journals were selected. The classification of journals by fields followed that used previously. 2 The necessary data were obtained by counting and countrywise pooling the editors. In so doing we considered editors, the editor-in-chief, the editor(s), the deputy editor(s) (in-chief), the managing editor, the members of the editorial board and advisory board, excepting only the technical editor(s). Table 1 shows the field, country and geopolitical region distribution of editors in the 252 journal sample. It shows quite clearly that the decision power in science journal gatekeeping is firmly in the hands of scientists from a few (4-5) developed countries. In almost all cases, the primus inter pares in the editorial boards of science is the editor-in-chief: a respected scientist or scholar, assuming, as it were, personal responsibility for the papers published in his or her journal. An attempt is made here to have a quantitative view on the professional status and influence of the editors-in-chief of 769 medical journals. By using the method of citation analysis, answers are sought to the question whether the editors-in-chief as authors have larger influence and/or authority than an average author in the respective subject field. 769 journals in 28 medical subject fields were included in our study. The 894 editors-in-chief of these journals were identified from Ulrich's International Periodical Directory (1986,1987, and 1988 editions on CD-ROM). Source data from the years 1981 to 1985 and citations to them in the same 5-years period were used in the analysis. Journal citation indicators were produced by processing the magnetic tapes of the SCI database; citation data of the editors-in-chiefs' firstauthored papers were searched manually from the printed SCI volumes. Prior 118 Thoughts in the library "
