What is Journal Selection Process?

Introduction:-


Thomson Reuters is committed to providing comprehensive coverage of the world`s most important and influential journals to meet its subscribers current awareness and retrospective information retrieval needs. Today Web of Science Cover over 9,000 international and regional journals and book series in every area of the natural sciences, social sciences,art and humanities. But comprehensive does not necessarily mean all-inclusive.




Why Be Selective?
It would appear that, in order to be comprehensive, an index to scientific journal literature might be expected to cover all the scientific journals published. This approach would be not only impractical economically, but as analyses of the scientific literature have shown, unnecessary. It has been demostrated that a relatively small number of journals publish the bulk of significant scientific results. This principle is often referred to as Bradford Law.


In the mid- 1930`s S.C Bradford realized that the core literature for any given scientific discipline was composed of fewer than 1,000 journals. Of these 1,000 journals, there are relatively few with a very strong relevance to the given topic, whereas there are many with a weaker relevance to it.


Those with a weak relevance to the given discipline or topic, however, typically have a strong relevance to some other discipline. thus, the core scientific literature can form itself around various topics, with individual journals becoming more or less relevant depending on the topic.


More recently an analysis of 7,528 journals covered in the 2005 JCR revealed that as few as 300 journals account for more than 50% of what is cited and more than 25% of what is published in them. A core of 3,000of these journals accounts for about 75% of published articles and over 90% of cited articles.






to be continued......