Global Ecology and Biogeography
A statistical overview of 2
or 4 years of the journal
to be made available through
the LIS Learning Showcase Web Server, at the
Global
Ecology and Biogeography
A statistical overview of 2 or 4 years of the journal
1999-2000 & 1999-2002
I. Bibliometric analysis:
Introduction
Global Ecology and Biogeography is a Geographic Information Science journal
produced electronically and in print bi-monthly (which has never changed) by
Blackwell Science Ltd. out of Oxford, U.K.
You can find two home pages on the Web.
One with the U. of Michigan’s
JSTOR (Journal Storage) archive which stores the original Global Ecology and Biogeography Letters (ISSN 0960-7447) published
from 1991 to 1998 at http://www.jstor.org/journals/1466822X.html
. There are no freely accessible items
available on JSTOR. The other home page
includes the current publication called Global
Ecology and Biogeography: a journal of macroecology (ISSN 1466-822X) from
1998 on, at http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journals/geb
. Items published freely on Blackwell’s site are abstracts of selected
volume/issue articles, as well as subject area e-mail alerts. The full-text items are not free and must be
subscribed to.
Ulrich’s Periodical Directory points out that a subscription
costs $280 USD or $167 GBP annually.
They also provide address, phone, fax , e-mail and URL information for
Blackwell Science. The directory tells
us that Global Ecology and Biogeography
(GEB) is an “academic scholarly” type
of publication that is registered with the Copyright Clearance Center, and
indexed or abstracted in numerous publications including Ecological Abstracts, Current
Contents and SCI.
The title change of the periodical reflects the
Editor-in-Chief’s desire for an evolution of content towards the idea of
diversity as coined in the term “macroecology”.[1] As Robert Whittaker puts it “…the most
exciting feature of the journal to date has been the diversity of approaches to
ecology and biogeography—and the incorporation of ideas and methods from other
disciplines…”.[2] The published aim of the journal
hyper-linked at Blackwell’s homepage, “welcomes, succinct, scientific material
relating to historical, spatial, ecological and applied biogeography for rapid
publication and particularly encourages submissions on: macroecology…” and
numerous other disciplines.
The shift in focus from …Letters to …a journal of macroecology brought to the readers an emphasis from primarily short “correspondence items” to “full length Research Articles and Research Review papers”.[3]
This publication has both editors and editorial
board members, the current editorial head, Dr. Robert Whittaker currently holds
the position of University Reader in Biogeography, Fellow and Tutor at St.
Edmund Hall, Oxford.[4]
He is also the deputy editor of the sister journals Diversity and Distributions and the Journal of Biogeography and has since 1991 authored or coauthored a
total of 51 articles in his chosen discipline[5];
listed with him is Ian Woodward, Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, U of
Sheffield and Brian Maurer, Department of Geography, Michigan State U. The Book Review Editor is Richard Field,
School of Geography, U of Nottingham.
The editorial board is extensive, including Tim Blackburn, U of
Birmingham plus 30 others.
U of A has both an incomplete bound collection and web access
to all issues of both GEB Letters and
GEB through links to the journal home
pages mentioned earlier. U of A’s
catalog regarding GEB Letters shows they have bound v. 1-7,
1991-1998 and web access to v. 1-6, 1991-1997 (actually Web access exists
through v. 7). The catalog regarding
later GEB issues includes the bound v. 8 and 9 only, with Web access from v. 8,
1999 to present (this also is in error, Web access exists from v. 7, 1998 to
present). U of A Science librarians
will circulate current and back issues of the journals overnight.
Summary Statistics:
The statistics used for this report for both “Author productivity” and “Bibliometric profile” analysis, comes from 23 journal issues published from 1999 to 2002, all remaining studies include just 11 issues for two representative years 1999 and 2000. The citation data came from ISI’s Web of Science (WOS), Science Citation Index (SCI-Expanded) General Search, for applicable periods. Only those papers indexed in the WOS Citation index were used in citation studies, and included Articles, Corrections, Editorial Material, Letters (to the editor), and Reviews. The short 1-2 page “Library Letters” are a less scholarly publication with few if any citations—they should not be confused with “Letters to the editor”—though numerous, these documents are neither indexed in ISI or used for citation data in this report.
Geographic view:
Principle authors represented 18 countries in 11
issues of the journal (1999-2000)—66 documents. 31 “Library Letter” documents were not used. Country
representation was determined by accessing the HTML view of each journal and
pulling the institutional affiliation information located at the right side of
the digitized document. The Geographical map at Figure 1 represents a
proportional primary author country representation for the 66 documents—1
square for each paper.
In this
two year cross section of the journal, the United States can be seen to have
produced roughly 1/5 more documents (25) than the UK (19) which originally
founded the journal. The rest of the
countries represented produced 1-3 papers each; at 16 countries, this is an
average of roughly 1.5 papers per country.
Figure 1.
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