[GOAL] Re: Update on Ulrichs estimate of total number of active peer-reviewed journals: 55, 311

[Niamh Brennan]

The unexpectedly high figure is due to Ulrich's counting the print version and the electronic version of a journal title as separate journals.

Example (using a smaller dataset): a search for active journals which are academic/scholarly and peer reviewed/refereed filtered by Country of Publication=Ireland shows the total number of journals as 175.

These are listed in Ulrich's as comprising the following:

Print (77)
Online (65)
Microform (33)
LooseLeaf (1) 

However when the duplicate titles are (manually) removed from the downloaded spreadsheet the number of unique journal titles is 154.

Heather Morrison has commented on this issue here:

http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ie/2012/05/about-30-of-peer-reviewed-scholarly.html

where she says:

'we don't have a count of how many peer-reviewed journals there are in the world. We tend to use Ulrich's as a surrogate, however this list reflects a strong English-language / western bias, e.g. Ulrich's would only include a very tiny fraction of the academic journals from China.

Something else to keep in mind is that is has become more difficult to assess the number of peer-reviewed journals in Ulrich's, because the default search does not deduplicate for multiple formats (i.e. a quick search for academic / peer-reviewed / scholarly journals will yield two titles when a journal is produced in both print and electronic form).

My latest count of active, peer-reviewed scholarly journals from Ulrich's using deduplication from Dec. 1, 2011 is 26,746. My method and calculations are shown here, in this appendix of my draft thesis:

http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/appendix-c-how-many-active-scholarly-peer-reviewed-journals/ "

Heather's methodology looks like the best we can do with Ulrich's. However when her method is applied to my example above with the small dataset of Irish journals (77 print + 6 electronic only = 83) the result falls considerably short of the actual number of unique journal titles for that dataset (154 - deduplicated manually). Perhaps it works better with a larger dataset.

It would be very helpful if Ulrich's would provide a simple 'De-duplicate' option on its search results. 

Meanwhile it would be an easy matter for Ulrich's to provide us with the data. Let's ask them!

Best wishes,

Niamh









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Niamh Brennan
Programme Manager, Research Information Systems & Services
Ussher Library, Second Floor,
Trinity College Library Dublin,
College Street,
Dublin 2
Ireland

phone: +353 1 896 1646
email: niamh.brennan at tcd.ie
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________________________________________
From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [goal-bounces at eprints.org] On Behalf Of Sally Morris [sally at morris-assocs.demon.co.uk]
Sent: 03 August 2012 21:53
To: 'Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)'
Subject: [GOAL] Re: Update on Ulrichs estimate of total number of active        peer-reviewed journals: 55, 311

I find this figure very surprising.  What appears to be the same search, carried out this past March, came up with a (to me) much more credible figure of 27,566.

Sally


Sally Morris
South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex, UK  BN13 3UU
Tel:  +44 (0)1903 871286
Email:  sally at morris-assocs.demon.co.uk


________________________________
From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad
Sent: 03 August 2012 20:08
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Cc: LibLicense-L Discussion Forum
Subject: [GOAL] Update on Ulrichs estimate of total number of active peer-reviewed journals: 55, 311

For years now, I've just been re-using an old Ulrich<http://ulrichsweb.serialssolutions.com>'s estimate of about 25,000 for the total number of active peer-reviewed journals.

Prompted by a recent query from someone, I've checked again, and -- unless I've made a mistake in my search -- the number now seems to have doubled to 55,311.

The parameters I used to get this figure were (1) Active, (2) Journal, (3) Academic/Scholarly, (4) Refereed/Peer-reviewed,

A further breakdown shows that of these 55,311 active peer reviewed journals,

23,527 (43%) are available online

9,354 (17%) are indexed in Thomson-Reuters-ISI's Journal Citation reports

6,962 (13%) are open access journals (freely available online) (Gold OA, presumably not including Hybrid Gold).

769 (11%) of the 9,354 Thomson-Reuters-ISI-indexed journals are open access journals

--

According to the last estimate of journals indexed by SHERPA/ROMEO (which does not include all the journals indexed by Ulrichs, but does include most of the top journals indexed by Thomson-Reuters-ISI):

60% of journals recognize the author's right to provide immediate, un-embargoed open access upon self-archiving their final drafts in their institutional repositories.

--

It would be helpful if others could check and confirm these figures.

Stevan Harnad