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Positive correlation between quality and quantity in academic journals

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  • Huang, Ding-wei

Abstract

This study reports a positive correlation between impact factor and article number in scholarly journals. High impact journals publish more articles. Quality and quantity are positively correlated. This is a common trend in different disciplines as revealed by empirical data. The correlation is obscure in a direct plot of article number versus impact factor. A plot of accumulated article number versus normalized rank of impact factor clearly demonstrates the correlation. The reasons behind this correlation are discussed.

Suggested Citation

  • Huang, Ding-wei, 2016. "Positive correlation between quality and quantity in academic journals," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 10(2), pages 329-335.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:infome:v:10:y:2016:i:2:p:329-335
    DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2016.02.002
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    Cited by:

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    2. Kosyakov, Denis & Pislyakov, Vladimir, 2024. "“I'd like to publish in Q1, but there's no Q1 to be found”: Study of journal quartile distributions across subject categories and topics," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 18(1).
    3. Roberto Fernández‐Gago & Laura Cabeza‐García & José‐Luis Godos‐Díez, 2020. "How significant is corporate social responsibility to business research?," Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 27(4), pages 1809-1817, July.
    4. Kaltrina Nuredini, 2021. "Investigating Altmetric Information For The Top 1000 Journals From Handelsblatt Ranking In Economic And Business Studies," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 35(5), pages 1315-1343, December.
    5. Singh, Mayank & Chakraborty, Tanmoy & Mukherjee, Animesh & Goyal, Pawan, 2016. "Is this conference a top-tier? ConfAssist: An assistive conflict resolution framework for conference categorization," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 10(4), pages 1005-1022.
    6. Barbara S. Lancho-Barrantes & Hector G. Ceballos-Cancino & Francisco J. Cantu-Ortiz, 2021. "Comparing the efficiency of countries to assimilate and apply research investment," Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology, Springer, vol. 55(4), pages 1347-1369, August.
    7. Matthew J Michalska-Smith & Stefano Allesina, 2017. "And, not or: Quality, quantity in scientific publishing," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 12(6), pages 1-12, June.
    8. Laakso, Mikael & Björk, Bo-Christer, 2016. "Hybrid open access—A longitudinal study," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 10(4), pages 919-932.
    9. Allahbakhsh, Mohammad & Amintoosi, Haleh & Behkamal, Behshid & Beheshti, Amin & Bertino, Elisa, 2021. "SCiMet: Stable, sCalable and reliable Metric-based framework for quality assessment in collaborative content generation systems," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 15(2).
    10. Perlin, Marcelo S. & Santos, André A.P. & Imasato, Takeyoshi & Borenstein, Denis & Da Silva, Sergio, 2017. "The Brazilian scientific output published in journals: A study based on a large CV database," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 11(1), pages 18-31.
    11. Antonio Perianes-Rodríguez & Carlos Olmeda-Gómez, 2019. "Effects of journal choice on the visibility of scientific publications: a comparison between subscription-based and full Open Access models," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 121(3), pages 1737-1752, December.
    12. Gawai, Vikas PD & Foltz, Jeremy D., 2023. "Discrimination in Science: Salaries of Foreign and US Born Land-Grant University Scientists," 2022 Annual Meeting, July 31-August 2, Anaheim, California 322134, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
    13. Antonoyiannakis, Manolis, 2018. "Impact Factors and the Central Limit Theorem: Why citation averages are scale dependent," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(4), pages 1072-1088.
    14. Elías Sanz-Casado & Daniela Filippo & Rafael Aleixandre Benavent & Vidar Røeggen & Janne Pölönen, 2021. "Impact and visibility of Norwegian, Finnish and Spanish journals in the fields of humanities," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(11), pages 9031-9049, November.
    15. Ruben Miranda & Esther Garcia-Carpintero, 2019. "Comparison of the share of documents and citations from different quartile journals in 25 research areas," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 121(1), pages 479-501, October.

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