Diffusion of medical journals analysed through citations

Abstract

Impact Factor (IF) is a popular bibliometircs and scientometrics tool for assessing the 
performance of scholarly journals. But there are many national journals from developing and 
under developing countries which are not indexed by SCI and are without IF. National journals 
play a vital role for a country. It is suggested that the performance of a journal cannot be 
measured by a single indicator. Diffusion of information is a basic notion of publications and 
citations. So diffusion study has been used to measure the influence of a journal. In this study 
two Indian non-SCI medical journals, viz., Indian Journal of Cancer and Journal of Communicable 
Diseases were selected for diffusion measure. New JDF and equivalent IF is calculated using 
citations data. Data is collected from Elsevier’s SCOPUS database for the period of 2001-
2010. It is found that there is improvement in Diffusion factors for both journals, but there 
is significant rise for Indian Journal of Cancer.As Journal of Communicable Disease is cited by 
more number of countries than Indian Journal of Cancer, so the former is more international 
in nature. Generally they have published papers mostly from India, but number of foreign 
authored papers has been increased in IJC. Open access of IJC may be one of the factors for 
better performance.