by Jill Ross
In this article, Periodicals Editor Jill Ross shares some positive trends regarding the online visibility and reach of Materials Evaluation (ME).
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ME’s online presence started when ASNT’s online NDT Library was officially launched in 2016 containing more than 1300 documents, including ME papers dating back to 2002 (ndtlibrary.asnt.org). Adding papers to an online repository meant that they were searchable via various search engines, such as Google Scholar. In 2020, ASNT took another important step by adding DOI numbers to technical papers and articles published in ME. A DOI, or digital object identifier, is a string of numbers, letters, and symbols used to permanently identify an article or document and link to it on the web (often preceded by https://doi.org/). In our case, the DOI links back to the ME paper in the NDT Library.
Adding DOI numbers to ME papers has been an extremely successful endeavor, resulting in as many as 1000+ “resolutions,” or links back, to the NDT Library in a single month (Figure 1). These numbers will only continue to grow, since resolutions are cumulative and not for a single issue or volume of the journal.
Google Scholar Metrics provide another easy way for authors to quickly gauge the visibility and influence of scholarly publications. Scholar Metrics summarize recent citations to publications and calculate an “h-index” of the journal. The h-index of a publication is the largest number h such that at least h articles in that publication were cited at least h times each. For example, a publication with five articles cited by, respectively, 17, 9, 6, 3, and 2, has an h-index of 3. ME has an h-index of 33 as of July 2021, the most recent data available (Figure 2).
Another metric to consider is the impact factor (IF) of a journal. The IF is a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year. It is used to measure the importance or rank of a journal by calculating the times its articles are cited. The IF is based on Journal Citation Reports (JCR) drawing from data in the Web of Science Group (owned by Clarivate Analytics). JCR provides ranking for journals in the areas of science, technology, and social sciences. For every journal covered, the following information is collected or calculated: citation and article count, immediacy index, cited half-life, citing half-life, source data listing, citing journal listing, cited journal listing, subject categories, and publisher information. As you can see, IFs are somewhat complicated and mysterious as to how they are calculated. ME’s 2020 IF is 0.772, which is up from 0.481 in 2019.
The SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) is a more straightforward alternative to IF, in the form of average citations per document in a two-year period. Its data source is Scopus (owned by Elsevier). It calculates current-year citations to the source items published in that journal during the previous three years. ME’s two-year SJR has risen significantly within the last few years, from 0.221 in 2017 to 1.0 in 2020. This is the highest SJR indicator for ME since they began tracking it in 2000 and it is an increase of more than 400%.
IFs should be taken with a grain of salt. Niche publishers will naturally have lower IFs, while more general-audience journals like Nature and Science will have very high IFs. That said, we are delighted to see these positive trends, which I believe will only increase due to increasing use of DOI numbers and online linking.
We would be honored if you would consider ME as the publisher for your research and join in ASNT’s mission to advance the profession of nondestructive testing and create a safer world—together.
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Jill Ross is Periodicals Editor at ASNT; jross@asnt.org.
Materials Evaluation is ASNT’s flagship journal with news and features covering all aspects of NDT and the NDT industry. The technical content in ME is peer-reviewed by qualified technicians and researchers, ensuring quality details and discussion. The journal’s history and archive reaches back to the earliest formative days of the Society.
ME accepts two types of papers for publication: Feature Papers and Technical Papers. Subject matter may cover traditional and nontraditional areas of NDT. More information about submitting a paper can be found on the ASNT website.
ME is free to members. Nonmembers can subscribe to ME from the ASNT website.