Data

For this exercise, indexed documents between 2010 and 2019 and their corresponding citations were consulted in four databases:

Our journal is indexed on Science Citation Index Expanded from the Web of Science database. However, the institutional subscription to this database was not active when the data were collected; it was therefore not included.

The information from OJS, Scopus, and SciELO was organized by year of publication and by the year in which the citations were conceded. The data from GS had to be filtered according to the following procedure:

In Table 1, the amount of published and indexed articles is shown for each year in the different databases. Similarly, Table 2 shows the citations obtained by such documents.

Analysis

Following the recommendations from ^{Hicks, Wouters, Waltman, De Rijcke, Rafols (2015)}, and ^{DORA (2012)}, particularly regarding metrics from different sources, we will now present the citation results obtained by the articles published in our journal, as well as other indicators, with no preference given to any of them. Figure 1 shows the evolution of the citations. It can be observed that, between 2010 y 2016, GS perceived the greatest amount, followed by Scopus and, finally, SciELO. This changes as of 2017, where SciELO shows a growing tendency.

Source: Authors

Figure 1 Citations obtained by articles in I&I for each database. 

Generally speaking, the citations from the three databases cannot be compared, since the documents included in each one are different. However, considering what was described by ^{Martín-Martín, Orduna-Malea, Thelwall, and Delgado López-Cózar (2018)}, there is an overlap between the citations perceived by different sources, which is why the results can be interpreted as follows:

First of all, out of all citations received by scientific engineering journals, 63% can be found on GS and Scopus; the remaining 37% can be found on other databases or is not readable by electronic means. Secondly, SciELO was not taken into account by ^{Martín-Martín et al. (2018)}. However, this database publishes the complete contents of the articles in PDF format, which is why all citations from ScieLO are included in GS. The difference in citations perceived in recent years between SciELO and GS may be related to the moment at which they are identified; presence on SciELO allows to perceive them sooner than on Scopus and GS, which offer a greater amount of citations in the long run.

This can be contrasted with the immediacy index. In the present note, we will calculate such index as the ratio, expressed as a percentage, between the citations obtained in the year of publication of a journal issue. The data are illustrated in Figure 2.

Source: Authors

Figure 2 I&I journal immediacy index for Scopus, SciELO, and GS. 

The results from Figure 2 show that citations are perceived more quickly by GS than Scopus and SciELO. This does not contradict previous results, since the citations obtained by an issue throughout several years are shown in Figure 1, while those obtained during the same year are displayed in Figure 2. GS data filtering made it evident that a significant part of the obtained citations come from authentic scientific journals, with a broad publication record and active scientific communitites. Although such journals might not be indexed on Scopus or SciELO, it is possible to claim that the Ingeniería e Investigación journal has awide visibility and an international scope, resulting from its open access policy, as mentioned by ^{Pavas (2017)}.

The data from Tables 1 and 2 can be combined to calculate the citations-per-document indicator. This is achieved through the ratio of the total citations obtained by the articles published during a year, divided by the amount of published documents. The results are shown in Figure 3.

Source: Authors

Figure 3 Citations per document on Scopus, SciELO, and GS. 

From Figure 3, it is possible to confirm the previously observed trends. In the long run, GS detects a greater amount of citations than SciELO and Scopus, which, in turn, detects more citations than SciELO. However, SciELO generates more citations in recent periods.

In ^{Orduña-Malea, Martín-Martín, Ayllón, and Delgado López-Cózar (2016)}, as well as in other sources, Google Scholar's diverse flaws as a reliable bibliographical source are mentioned. There is a large amount of cases in which documents identified as citation sources are not authentic, they are not really articles of scientific journals, or the identified citations are assigned due to semantic similarity without really having been referenced. On the other hand, ^{Sugimoto and Lariviere (2018)} highlight the benefits of databases such as Scopus, Web of Science, and SciELO regarding the quality of the generated metadata and a higher accuracy in citation identification -it is necessary to emphasize that they are better, but they still have flaws. Among the lessons learned from this exercise in permanent revision is that the generation and management of metadata at the moment of publication and indexation significantly improve article visibility, generated citations, and the possiblitiy of being identified by the readers. Ingeniería e Investigación, with support from the National Library Directorate of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, makes a permanent effort to distribute and make its contents visible, as well as to generate metadata which enable effective content localization in all citation databases.