Dejan Pajić

On the stability of citation-based journal rankings

The article presents a large-scale comparison of journal rankings based on seven impact measures: Impact Factor (2- and 5-year), SJR, IPP, SNIP, H index, and Article Influence Score. Three aspects of ranking stability in the 2007–2014 period were analyzed: temporal, cross-discipline, and cross-indicator. Impact measures based on five-year citation windows enable more stable journal rankings over time. Journal rankings based on the source-normalized indicator (SNIP) have the largest cross-discipline stability. Journals in the fields of social sciences and humanities have lower temporal and cross-discipline ranking stability compared to those in “hard” sciences. Although correlation coefficients indicate relatively high agreement among the rankings based on different indicators, variations in quartile and percentile ranks suggest different conclusions. WoS journals almost linearly improve their ranking positions in Scopus lists, while many high-impact journals covered by Scopus are not available in WoS. An important element of the ranking stability is the discriminability of impact measures. Beyond the segregation between the top and bottom ranked journals, our assessment of “quality” relies in most cases on a rather arguable assumption that a couple of citations more or less is making a big difference.

TENDENCY TO SELF-HANDICAPPING IN THE SITUATION OF EXPECTED FAILURE

The basic objective of this research is to determine what type of self-handicapping strategies subjects will use when they face potential failure, under the condition that they have the possibility of strategy choice. Another research objective is directed to the research of relation between the selected self-handicapping strategy and personality characteristics. 120 student of the second and third year of the Department of psychology, University of Novi Sad has been taken into sample. In the first research stage, all students administrated a series of personality self-report tests. In the second experiment stage, the participants were divided into four groups, on the basis of two criteria: the solvability of intelligence test tasks and the presence of hampering factors during task solving. The research results show that there are at least two types of self-handicapping strategies. One type is used by the majority of people when found in the situation where potential failure is expected. It refers to searching for alibis in external circumstances and it is probably the reflection of sound tendencies of facing possible consequences of information on one’s own incompetence. Another type of strategies presents consistent behaviour pattern, determined by the higher degree of adverse affectivity and negative image of oneself, and it is manifested in the use of poor psychophysical condition as the alibi for failure.

Maps of science based on keywords of articles’ antecedences, presences, and consequences: Application of the CEON/CEES model of multi-perspective description of articles

A model of multi-perspective article description (MPAD) was explored and preliminarily tested. The model assumes that journal articles should be described for bibliographic purposes from three different perspectives, i.e. by using keywords extracted from: (1) article titles and abstracts, (2) titles of their cited references, and (3) titles and abstracts of articles citing them in the future. In order to explore the relationships among keyword types and to test the model preliminarily, a method labeled as Multistage Indexing of Subject Headings (MISH) based on the Keyphrase Extraction Algorithm (KEA) was employed to provide all three types of keywords for all articles from the sample. The articles were sampled from SCIndeks: The Serbian citation index. Three separate maps of (local, peripheral) science were constructed, each based on a different type of keywords. The Partitioning Around Medoid method (PAM) for cluster analyses, followed by multidimensional scaling for visual representations of extracted clusters, was employed. Results suggest that the three types of keywords generate relatively similar maps, encouraging keywords aggregation for practical purposes. Some differences among the maps are not fully consistent with the predictions derived from the model. They reveal some methodological deficiencies of the study and indicate the most promising directions for further research.

Structure of personality psychology based on cocitation analysis of prominent authors

Traditional Author Cocitation Analysis was applied in order to map the personality psychology as a research field. A group of 25 authors were selected from the Haggbloom (1999, 2002) lists of the most cited and prominent psychologists, judged to be the main contributors to the field. All of their cocitations identified in the three year volumes of SSCI were downloaded to be analyzed by cluster analysis and MDS. The analysis resulted in four clusters comprising (1) theorists of individual differences amalgamated with authors of biological orientation with R. Cattell positioned centrally, (2) behaviorists joined by socio-cognitive theorists led by M.E.P. Seligman and A. Bandura, and (3) the group of psychoanalytic (dynamic) theorists with A. Adler in the middle. In fourth cluster G. Allport, H. Murray, K. Lewin, W. Mischel, and D. Buss were found mixed together to make a rather heterogeneous group. In two-axes representation one of the dimensions was understood as reflecting methodological and the other one content-specific differences among the authors, although this interpretation is not univocal. The same procedure was repeated on citations given to the same authors in SocioFakt - the Serbian Citation Index for Social Sciences, revealing a reduced picture of the domain. At this portrait, some important authors are missing as a result of their low citation rate, suggesting that in the Serbian personality psychology entire research fields don’t exist. .