Abstract
Indicators in a research Institute ought to be readable at several decision levels, and particularly with different break-downs of the publication set chosen as reference. Citation transactions between journals have been widely used to structure scientific subfields in ISI databases. We tried a seed-free structuration of SCI/CMCI journals (a) to test convergence of pure citation-built specialties (roughly 150) on SCI/CMCI journals with existing classifications at the subfield level (b) to explore the interest and the limits of this approach for upper levels of aggregation (roughly 30 fields). A few limits of journal-level classification are addressed. At the subfield level, the convergence is large with some discrepancies worth noticing. At the subdiscipline level, the method is not sufficient to achieve a satisfactory 30-level delineation, but gives a good basis for informed expert validation.
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Bassecoulard, E., Zitt, M. Indicators in a research institute: A multi-level classification of scientific journals. Scientometrics 44, 323–345 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02458483
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02458483