Research on impact evaluation of academic journals from multidimensional perspective: Taking international multi-disciplinary journals as an example

The purpose of this paper is to introduce altmetric indicators and combine with traditional citation indicators to comprehensively evaluate the impact of academic journals from the perspective of multidimensional and multi-indicator fusion.

The authors take international multidisciplinary journals as an example, combining 14 traditional citation indicators of academic journals and introducing 14 altmetric indicators to build a comprehensive evaluation model of the impact of academic journals (academic impact and societal impact). At the same time, the authors systematically construct a journal evaluation indicator system from three dimensions. Then, the indicators data of three dimensions are evaluated by normalized processing, correlation analysis, reliability and validity analysis, PCA and factor analysis.

Two-dimensional and three-dimensional analyses can exactly provide some useful information for academic journals’ location in the respective coordinate systems. There are strong positive correlations among the measured indicators in the three dimensions, and each indicator has a significant consistency between whole and internal. The correlation coefficient between FD1 and FD2 is 0.888 with a strong positive correlation. It shows that the traditional citation indicators provided by WoS and Scopus database are highly consistent, and they are comparable and alternative in evaluating the academic impact of journals. The correlation coefficients of FD1, FD2 with FD3 are 0.831 and 0.798. There are strong positive correlations among them, which indicate that the evaluation of journals’ societal impact based on altmetrics indicator can be considered as a potential supplement to academic impact evaluation based on citation and to reflect the multidimensional nature of journals impact in an immediate way.

Multidimensional and multi-indicator perspective evaluation can provide references for the selection of impact evaluation indicators and model optimization of academic journals, and also provide new ideas for improving the status of the impact evaluation of academic journals.