A DISCIPLINE-SPECIFIC JOURNAL SELECTION ALGORITHM

An experiment was conducted to demonstrate the validity of a journal selection and ranking algorithm designed for any discipline. The characteristics of the journal generation procedure incorporate both cited and citing journals so that basic scientific research journals contributing to the research foundation of the discipline, as well as journals in the discipline, might be identified. A Discipline Influence Score was proposed as a journal weight which could reflect the relative citation influence of each journal to the discipline under consideration. Two evaluation studies showed that this method produced many journals which were perceived as frequently used journals by a group of American and Chinese professionals in veterinary medicine. Journals with high Discipline Influence Scores were also selected by experts in their compilations of basic recommended lists in this discipline. In particular, the easy implementation of this journal selection algorithm appears to be of practical use to resource-poor libraries. © 1986.