Association between the Rankings of Top Bioinformatics and Medical Informatics Journals and the Scholarly Reputations of Chief Editors

The scientometric indices, such as the journal Impact Factor (IF) or SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), often play a determining role while choosing a journal for possible publication. The Editor-in-Chief (EiC), also known as a lead editor or chief editor, usually decides the outcomes (e.g., accept, reject...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Salim Sazzed
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2021-09-01
Series:Publications
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/9/3/42
Description
Summary:The scientometric indices, such as the journal Impact Factor (IF) or SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), often play a determining role while choosing a journal for possible publication. The Editor-in-Chief (EiC), also known as a lead editor or chief editor, usually decides the outcomes (e.g., accept, reject) of the submitted manuscripts taking the reviewer’s feedback into account. This study investigates the associations between the EiC’s scholarly reputation (i.e., citation-level metrics) and the rankings of top Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BCB) and Medical Informatics (MI) journals. I consider three scholarly indices (i.e., citation, h-index, and i-10 index) of the EiC and four scientometric indices (i.e., h5-index, h5-median, impact factor, and SJR) of various journals. To study the correlation between scientometric indices of the EiC and journal, I apply Spearman (<inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mi>ρ</mi></semantics></math></inline-formula>) and Kendall (<inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mi>τ</mi></semantics></math></inline-formula>) correlation coefficients. Moreover, I employ machine learning (ML) models for the journal’s SJR and IF predictions leveraging the EiC’s scholarly reputation indices. The analysis reveals no correlation between the EiC’s scholarly achievement and the journal’s quantitative metrics. ML models yield high prediction errors for SJR and IF estimations, which suggests that the EiC’s scholarly indices are not good representations of the journal rankings.
ISSN:2304-6775