Visualization of the Citation Impact Environments of Scientific Journals: An online mapping exercise

TL;DR

This paper presents an online visualization tool for analyzing citation environments of scientific journals, enabling detailed mapping of citation links and impact, with applications to interdisciplinary research like nanotechnology.

Contribution

It introduces a novel online mapping exercise that visualizes journal citation networks and impact, including correction for self-citations and analysis of interdisciplinary developments.

Findings

Citation impact varies across journals and fields.

Nanotechnology shows significant interdisciplinary citation patterns.

The visualization aids policy and research analysis.

Abstract

Aggregated journal-journal citation networks based on the Journal Citation Reports 2004 of the Science Citation Index (5968 journals) and the Social Science Citation Index (1712 journals) are made accessible from the perspective of any of these journals. The user is thus able to analyze the citation environment in terms of links and graphs. Furthermore, the local impact of a journal is defined as its share of the total citations in the specific journal's citation environments; the vertical size of the nodes is varied proportionally to this citation impact. The horizontal size of each node can be used to provide the same information after correction for within-journal (self)-citations. In the "citing" environment, the equivalents of this measure can be considered as a citation activity index which maps how the relevant journal environment is perceived by the collective of authors of a given journal. As a policy application, the mechanism of interdisciplinary developments among the sciences is elaborated for the case of nanotechnology journals.