Abstract:

The International Journal of Performability Engineerng (IJPE) is a peer-reviewed journal and was started in July 2005 as a quarterly international journal. Since 2010, IJPE has become a bimonthly journal. The statistics of number of citations based on the citations record available from freely available databases such as Google Scholar etc. for the papers published from 2005 up to 2012 is as given below in the Table 1. The numbers of citations, in this Table have been prepared based on the following sources of information:

1. Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.co.in/)
2. The SCImago Journal and Country Ranking
3. SCOPUS (http://www.scopus.com/
4. Microsoft Academic Research (http://academic.research.microsoft.com/)

Since the Impact Factor is a copyrighted term of Thomson Reuters, we cannot use this term to show how IJPE has made impact in the scientific world, we have used a term which we will call as Journal Visibility Factor (JVF), retaining a similar definition as that of the impact factor, which is defined as the number citations divided by the number of papers published during a given period of time.

Table 1: Number of Year-wise Citations of IJPE Papers and IJPE’s JVF

Legend for various columns shown in the Table 1 is as follows:

Column 1 (C1) – Year of publication,

Column 2 (C2) -Number of Issues published in that year

Column 3 (C3) -Number of papers published in that year,

Column 4 (C4) –Number of Citations During that year,

Column 5 (C5)– Journal Visibility Factor (JVF) for that year,

Column 6 (C6) - Cumulative Number of papers published from 2005 till that year, Column 7 (C7) - Cumulative Number of Citations from 2005 till that year,

Column 8 (C8) - Cumulative Journal Visibility Factor (CJVF) from 2005 till that year,

Also, C5*= C4/C3, and C8*-C7/C6, both being JVF.

As we can see from the foregoing Table that Journal Visibility Factor improves with the passage of time as the papers published in any journal become more and more visible to the scientific world and more citations get added to the papers published in the journal.

In addition to above databases, the NSD - a scientific data base of Norway (http://dbh.nsd.uib.no) which covers very many technical journals, places IJPE at higher acceptance level in comparison to many other journals in the area the IJPE deals with.

Even if we consider only citations in the past two years based on the above data sources for the assessment in 2012, the picture of IJPE citations emerges as follows:

But according to Thomson Reuters’ analysis, we received the following reply from them:

"… …Using this citation count as a numerator, and the total number of articles published by the journal in 2010 and 2011 as a denominator, we got the journal's 2012 Impact Factor, 0.0xx."

When contacted for this wide discrepancy, Thomson Reuters stated that they use Web of Science (WoS) for counting the number of citations.

To know the position of International Journal of Performability Engineering in respect to Thomson Reuters’ number of citations, we conducted a sample search for the IJPE for the period July 2005 to Dec. 2012 so that we can compare those results with results of Table 1. According to WoS the total number of cited papers of IJPE papers since July 2005 until Dec.2012 is only 14 with number of citations as 28, whereas according to Web of Knowledge (WoK), which is also a Thomson Reuter’s product, the number of cited papers of IJPE is 42 with total number of citations as 130 for the same period. This is incomprehensive. Also there are found to be incomplete listing of information about papers published in IJPE. It is not known how WoS or WoK collect and retrieve the information from a journal. When dealing with ranking of journals based on certain criteria, it is absolutely necessary to have utmost clarity and care in the procedure followed for collecting and retrieving data from the journal and should be openly available to all.

The very fact that authors from 47 countries have so far contributed their valuable contributions to the IJPE in such a short span of its existence and that we have been regularly receiving requests for the purchase of reprints of the papers published in IJPE, speaks volume of its visibility. IJPE has maintained the highest academic integrity and standards. Each paper is reviewed very carefully by competent referees and revised before a paper is published in the journal. IJPE has the most knowledgeable and well-known experts on its Editorial Board to advise and support its activities. If some organization does not take note of all this, we are not unduly bothered about it. As said before, we will continue to serve our readers to the best of our competence and provide the best of literature through IJPE.