Successes and Failures of Scientific Journals and Their Determinants

Abstract

Knowledge dissemination is one of the major avenues for sharing research results, improving practice, and gaining visibility in chosen areas of career or research practice. This is mostly achieved through peer-reviewed articles. Nowadays, such publishing is not easy due to the increasing number of scientific journal titles and the rapidly changing publishing market, the development of which is influenced by various factors. The goal of this work is: (1) identification of events which can be interpreted as successes and failures of scientific journals, (2) overview of indicators used for measurement of journal successes and failures, (3) analysis of scientific journal achievements and losses according to scientific disciplines, publishers, and country of publishing, (4) identification of factors determining successes and failures of research journals. Scopus database and SCImago Journal and Country Rank service will be used as the main sources of data for the analysis. As the need arises, some additional data will be retrieved with the web scraping technique. Only journals for the years 2010–2020 in individual categories were analyzed. All calculations will be performed by computer programs prepared by the authors in R and Python language.