Quality of scholarly journals and major selection criteria for coverage by the Web of Science

V.A. MarkusovaAll-Russian Institute for Scientific and Technical Information, Russian Academy of Sciences, Ul. Usievicha, 20, Moscow, 125190, RussiaE-mail: markusova@viniti.ruReceived 02.05. 2012ABSTRACT The major criteria for scholarly journals selection to be covered by the Web of Science are discussed. These criteria include the compliance of a journal with world standards, the international diversity, citation score of authors and editorial board members, the journal impact factor and journals self-citation. The demand for the unified transliteration of the authors name and the use of the unified English-language name and ad-dress of a research organization, as well as for including the information on funding organization (grant number and agency name) is emphasized.KEYWORDS journals; impact factor; citation; self-citation; selection criteria; Journal Citation Report; Web of Science.BIBLIOMETRIC INDICATORS AND THEIR ROLE IN THE EVALuATION OF THE RESEARCH ACTIVITY OF SCIENTIFIC INSTITuTIONS AND uNIVERSITIESthe significant geopolitical chang-es that have taken place during the past two decades, including the dissolution of the uSSr, have considerably altered the landscape of world science. Starting with the 1990s, a wave of market liberaliza-tion resulted in the establishment of a new economy, which was accom-panied by an unprecedented level of industrial activity, increased in-vestments into the high-technol-ogy sector and the corresponding changes in the economic structure. the governments of a number of countries, including the developing ones, consider science and technol-ogy to be the key factor of economic growth and development and thus have confronted the challenge of establishing a knowledge-intensive economy. the detailed pattern of the resulting significant changes in the number of students, PhD students, postdoctoral fellows, and researchers both in the u.S. and in other industrial and develop-ing countries was presented in the report of the u.S. national Science Foundation titled Science & en-gineering Indicators-2012 (SeI), published in January 2012, www.nsf. gov. Impressive statistics on the investments made in basic research in the u.S., the european union, china, russia, and the other lead-ing world countries was presented there. Furthermore, the meas-ures undertaken by the develop-ing countries for the development of a science and technology (St in this context, increasing attention is being put on assessing the yield and efficiency of the national innovation systems. the 5th section of the report was devoted to the bibliometric sta-tistics characterizing the levels of research and development (r&D) in these countries. this statistics is based on the data contained in the Science citation Index-expanded (ScI-e) and Social Science citation Index-expanded (SScI-e), which are parts of the Web of Science (WoS) produced by the thomson reuters (hereinafter, tr). the publication in a prestigious international journal covered by WoS is the most reliable method for bringing the results of the research to the attention of the world scien-tific community. Let us note that the experts who deal with assess-ing the output of scientific activity refer to all the journals covered by WoS as “international. ” the jour-nal’s prestige or its informational significance is assessed through the impact factor of a journal (IF). In accordance with the resolu-tion of the Presidium of rAS № 212 dated October 12, 2009, “On the establishment of the committee for the Assessment of the Activ-ity of Scientific Institutions,” the