Editorial

State of the h5 indicator for Colombian engineering journals

Upon the implementation of a new model for classifying national journals, different indicators for measuring journal impact are still a topic of discussion. In the most recent editorial note of Ingeniería e Investigación (Pavas, 2015), the classification of colombian journals was presented with respect to the most recognized international indexes.

One of the indicators that has recently gained importance is the h index. This index was proposed by J. E. Hirsch (2005) in order to compare the publications of an individual researcher, and it is defined as "the number of papers with citation number higher or equal to h". This indicator is widely used by diverse query tools such as Google Schola¹ and the program Publish or Perish (Harzing, 2007). The h index has not only been used for comparing researchers' productivity, but it has also been employed to compare journals. It can be calculated along specified observation windows, which allows to see the evolution of a researcher or a journal. The h5 index uses a five year long window as a time reference.

Publish or Perish is a free open access program, capable of performing personalized queries on the Google Scholar data base. Google Scholar represents a very important source, as it contains most of the visible open access and free resources, not only the information available in commercial data bases. Using this program, the Colombian engineering journals classified by Colciencias (Publindex, 2014) within the National Bibliographic Index IBN at the second update of 2014 were analyzed according to their h5 index. The indicator was observed over the last five years and was consulted in March, 2016. IBN has currently 4 engineering journals ranked at A1 category and 11 at A2.

Figure 1 shows the evolution of the h5 index for A1 journals (Ingeniería e Investigación, DYNA, Revista Facultad de Ingeniería Universidad de Antioquia and CT&F - Ciencia, Tecnología y Futuro). The indicator decreases with time, which is a natural trend. The average of yearly-based h5 indexes for A1 journals are clearly higher than the average of the A2 journals. This shows that IBN classification permits to differentiate journals according to the worldwide citation level.

Figure 2 shows a summary of the h5 indexes for A2 journals; due to lack of space, only ISSN codes are included. Despite the fact that some journals can reach h5 indexes equal or higher than h5 indexes of A1 journals, they were categorized as A2. According to Pavas (2015), the main reason for this difference is the presence of A1 journals in international data bases.

The quality of a journal should be evaluated following several criteria: editorial quality, periodicity, editorial board, number of published documents, visibility and impact. There is a certain agreement on evaluating impact based on citation levels. Nevertheless, citation is still under debate as it can be adjusted by different means, such as self-citation. On the other hand, low citation levels or high self-citation numbers can be acceptable in certain disciplines. The h5 indicator presented in this editorial note shows that there exists a correlation between the citation level and the results of Colciencias classification. The discussion on impact indicators is still open worldwide.

The Editorial Board of Ingeniería e Investigación is very pleased to present the first number of the 36^th volume. We would like to express our appreciation to authors and readers who made this new release possible. We expect the selected papers to be useful and of interest for our readers. Once again, Ingeniería e Investigación encourages authors to share their work.

Andrés Pavas
Assistant Professor
Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department
Director Ingeniería e Investigación Journal
Universidad Nacional de Colombia

Note

¹ See: https://scholar.google.com.co/.

References

Hirsch, J. E. (2005). An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 102 (46), 16569-16572. http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0508025.

Harzing, A.W. (2007) Publish or Perish, available from http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm.

Pavas, A. (2015). Editorial. Ranking of Colombian scientific journals: Engineering case Ingeniería e Investigación, 35(3), 3-4. http://www.revistas.unal.edu.co/index.php/ingeinv/article/view/54609/54655.

Publindex. (2014). Indice Bibliográfico Nacional - IBN Pub-lindex, II Actualización. Recuperado de: http://publindex.colciencias.gov.co:8084/publindex/EnIbnPublindex/resultados.do.