Web-based citation : a new metric for evaluating scientific journals

Purpose: For many years, the traditional citations indexes such as Web of Science and Scopus used to evaluate scientific journals. It is time to use new metric in library for evaluating scientific journals. This research tries to introduce web-based citation as a new metric for evaluating scientific journals, and answer the question of whether web-based citations could complement or even replace traditional citation or not. Methodology: In order to answer this question overlapping of these two types of citations was examined. Traditional citations were extracted from Web of Science and Scopus and web-based citation were extracted from Google Scholar. For this purpose 1344 research articles from 98 scientific open access journals in medical sciences, technology and engineering, humanities and social sciences were selected by proportional sampling method. The methodology used in this study was citation analysis. Findings: Results showed that the number of web-based citation (Google Scholar) in humanities, social sciences, technology and engineering and medical sciences were respectively 10, 9, near 5 and 2 more than the number of Web of Science. Overlapping citation showed that 74 percent of Web of Science citations and 70 percent of Scopus citations were covered by web-based citation in Google Scholar. Therefore, it can be concluded that the web-based citation could be used as new metric for evaluating scientific journals. The results showed web-based citations could complement or even replace traditional citations. It is time for libraries to take action and include support for web-based citation as well as traditional citation metrics in the selection and collection of scientific journals.