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

Keeping the gates of science journals studies indicate that first-author citation counts are a reasonably good and reliable approximation of total citation count.

3 For each journal and editor-in-chief the following data were collected: — the number of cited publications (papers published between 1981 and 1985 and cited in the same period) — the number of citations received between 1981 and 1985 by the above papers — the percentage of in-journal citations, that is, the percentage share of the citations from the journal itself in all citations received (for the editors-inchief: the percentage share of the citations from their own journals in all citations received by their papers published in their own journals). From these data two indicators were built:

4 — the Index of Editor Expertise (IEE): the ratio of the editor-in-chief s mean citation rate per cited paper to that of his or her journal — the Index of Editor Authority (IEA): the ratio of the editor-in-chief s percentage of in-journal citations to that of his or her journal. Both indexes have a value of 1.00 if there are no specific differences between the editor-in-chief and an average author. All editors-in-chief having at least one cited paper in the period in question (709 persons, 855 editorial chairs) were included in the determination of the Index of Editor Expertise (IEE); all editorsin-chief having at least one cited paper in their own journals in the period in question (353 persons, 435 editorial chairs) were included in the determination of the Index of Editor Authority (IEA). The overall average IEE value was 0.59, the overall average IEA value was 1.64. (The subset of editors considered in evaluating IEA had an average IEE of 0.61, i. e., no significant difference from the total set has been found.) The values of both indicators are presented at a subfield aggregate level in Tables 2 and 3, respectively. Subfield differences among IEE and IEA indexes, although interesting to consider, are in general, not statistically significant. The main inference to be drawn from the data presented in Tables 2 and 3 is obvious. In all but 3 of the 28 subfields of medicine, the editors-in-chief are, on average, less cited than the authors of their own journals; and in all but 6 subfields, the average percentage of in-journal citations is higher for the papers of the editors-in-chief than for those of "GI" author. The answer to the question of whether the editors-in-chiefs of medical journals are experts, authorities, both or neither is that they are not necessarily experts (in the sense of higher-than-average citation rate) but, as a rule, authorities - at least in their own specialties. The question now arises, if not their research eminence, what else might be the source of authority of these scientists? An obvious explanation would be to relate present authority to past expertise, to assume that 1981-1985 is too recent Gondolatok a könyvtárban " 119