Journal of Physical Studies 21(4), Article 4001 [19 pages] (2017)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.30970/jps.21.4001

TWENTY YEARS OF THE JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL STUDIES. AN ATTEMPT AT A JOURNALOMETRIC ANALYSIS

Yu. Holovatch^{1,2}, M. Krasnytska^{1,2}, O. Mryglod^{1,2}, A. Rovenchak^{3}
¹ Institute for Condensed Matter Physics, National Acad. Sci. of Ukraine,
1 Svientsitskii St., UA-79011 Lviv, Ukraine
² 𝕃⁴ Collaboration & Doctoral College for the Statistical Physics of Complex Systems,
Leipzig--Lorraine--Lviv--Coventry, Europe
³ Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, Department for Theoretical Physics,
12, Drahomanov St., Lviv, UA-79005, Ukraine

A case study of the ``journalometric'' analysis, i.e. the quantitative analysis of the publication data in a scientific journal, is presented in this paper. Different kinds of data can be used to describe various aspects of editorial work as well as to characterize the publication set. We consider the so-called internal and external data: the first data set includes all bibliographic data and information about the timing of editorial processes, while as the second data set, we use the statistics of citations obtained from outside sources (Web of Science and Scopus in our case). The methods of complex network theory, descriptive statistics, and regression analysis are useful tools to process such data. Coauthorship connections on the level of separate authors, countries, cities, and scientific topics are presented in the form of networks -- which is convenient for quantitative analysis and for visualization. The shape of citation distributions is discussed separately. All these results and findings are naturally framed by a short story about the history of the {\em Journal of Physical Studies}, an open access journal for the general field of physics published in Ukraine, which issued its 20th volume in 2016. The results of the case study presented here illustrate the combined approach to analyzing a scientific journal. It can be useful both for assessing the role of a journal as a whole, and for developing editorial policy for the future. A similar approach can be applied to analyze a group of journals, e.g. to describe the state of national scientific periodicals.

PACS number(s): 01.30.-y, 89.75.-k, 02.10.Ox, 02.50.-r

TWENTY YEARS OF THE JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL STUDIES. AN ATTEMPT AT A JOURNALOMETRIC ANALYSIS