Beom-Jong You

Citing Behavior of Korean Scientists on Foreign Journals in KSCD

There have been little comprehensive research for studying impact of foreign journals on Korean scientists. The main reason for this is because there was no extensive citation index database of domestic journals for analysis. Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) built the Korea Science Citation Database (KSCD). and have provided Korea Science Citation Index (KSCI) and Korea Journal Citation Reports (KJCR) services. In this article, citing behavior of Korean scientists on foreign journals was examined by using KSCD that covers Korean core journals. This research covers (1) analysis of foreign document types cited. (2) analysis of citation counts of foreign journals by subject and the ratio of citing different disciplines, (3) analysis of language and country of foreign documents cited, (4) analysis of publishers of journals and whether or not journals are listed on global citation index services and (5) analysis for current situation of subscribing to foreign electronic journals in Korea. The results of this res arch would be useful for establishing strategies for licensing foreign electronic journals and for information services. From this research, immediacy citation rate (average 1.46%), peak-time (average 3.9 years) and half-life (average 8 years) of cited foreign journals were identified. It was also found that Korean scientistis tend to cite journals covered in SCI(E) or SCOPUS, and 90% of cited foreign journals have been licensed by institutions in Korea.

A Study of Citing Patterns of Korean Scientists on Korean Journals

A large and reliable citation database is necessary to identify and analyze citation behavior of Korean researchers in science and technology. Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) built the Korea Science Citation Database (KSCD), and have provided Korea Science Citation Index (KSCI) and Korea Journal Citation Reports (KJCR) services. In this article, citing behavior of Korean scientists on Korean journals was examined by using the KSCD that covers 459 Korean core journals. This research dealt with (1) statistical numeric information of journals in KSCD, (2) analysis of document types cited. (3) ratio of domestic to international documents cited and ratio of citing different disciplines. (4) analysis on immediacy index, peak time, and half-life of cited documents, and (5) analysis on impact of journals based on KJCR citation indicators. From this research, we could find the immediacy citation rate (average 2.36%), peak-time (average 1.7 years) and half-life (average 5.2 years) of cited journals in Korea. We also found that the average journal self-citation rate is more than 50% in every field. In sum, citing behavior of Korean scientists on Korean journals was comprehensively identified from this research.

Analysis of Korea Science Citation Database`s effect on JCR

Citation analysis studies have reported many problems associated with data coverage problems common to popular citation databases such as Web of Science(WoS). In addition, the studies that analyzed citation patterns of Korean publications found that up to 75% of references in Korean publications were to international publications. As a first step in investigating the international coverage of WoS database, the study investigated the effect of adding citation data from Korea Science Citation Database(KSCD) to the impact factors and journal rankings of the journals listed in Journal Citation Reports. Specifically, the study mined the reference data from top 5 Korean Library and Information Science(KLIS) journals to recompute the impact factors reported in JCR 2009. Since the resulting journal rankings did not significantly differ from JCR 2009 rankings except for minor ranking changes, we analyzed additional citation data from 45 computer science and electrical engineering journals. Although the overall ranking difference was not statistically significant, one of the ranking partitions showed significant change. Such study findings despite its limited data sample suggest the potential impact of non-Western citation databases such as KSCD to bibliometric indicators provided by popular citation databases like WoS.