[BOAI] Publication of an article which explains JournalBase

[Christine Kosmopoulos]

The article "JournalBase - A Comparative International Study of 
Scientific Journal Databases in Social Sciences and Humanities" has been 
published last week in the open access journal Cybergeo:
http://www.cybergeo.eu/index22862.html

Presented for the first time, a comparative table of the contents of the 
databases that list the journals in the Social Sciences and the 
Humanities (SSH)named /JournalBase/ 
<http://www.cybergeo.eu/index22492.html> has been published, in June 
2009, in /Cybergeo. /The study covers the AHCI and the SSCI of the /WOS/ 
and /Scopus /(published by Elsevier), as well as the /European Reference 
Index for Humanities /(ERIH) and the lists of the French /Agence pour 
l’Evaluation de la Recherche et de l’Enseignement Supérieur /(AERES).
The research was carried out in 2008 with the financial support of the 
TGE Adonis of the CNRS.

The article presents the history of the project JournalBase, the 
methodology established by the authors, the difficulties encountered in 
comparing the data. The first results reveal a broader coverage of the 
ERIH list for the human sciences and an over-representation of the 
Anglophone journals in the commercial databases throughout the 
disciplines. The objective of this work is to provide information about 
the contents of these databases, at a time when bibliometric tools are 
raising much discussion about their application in the field of the 
Social Sciences and the Humanities (SSH).

In order to examine the proportion of journals in open access included 
in these sources, we made a first update of /JournalBase /on 17 July 
2009 from the journals inventoried in the list of the /Directory of Open 
Access Journals /(DOAJ). A this time, the DOAJ inventories in all 
disciplines mixed together, more than 4,200 active open access 
scientific journals, of which around 44% are journals in SSH, that is, a 
little more than 1,600. It can be observed that only a very small 
percentage of the journals of the DOAJ for the SSH are present in 
/JournalBase/, a little over 300 journals, that is, only 0.33% of the 
total number of journals inventoried in JournalBase. It also indicates 
that about 78% of the SSH journals presented in the DOAJ are not indexed 
in anyone of the five studied sources.

Christine Kosmopoulos


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