Effects of Peer Review

Effects of Peer Review

 Consider the following single and double-blind peer reviewed journals

Double-blind Review Process
Name of the Journal	Name of the Article	Date Received	Date Revised	Date Accepted
The Journal of Electromagnetic Engineering and Science      Web of Science     http://www.jees.kr/	Design of a Metamaterial Absorber for ISM Applications	15 November, 2012	2 January, 2013	7 February, 2013
	Rectangular Ring Open-Ended Monopole Antenna for Mobile Dual-Band Operations	20 November, 2012	21 December, 2012	2 January, 2013
	Quadruple Band-Notched Trapezoid UWB Antenna with Reduced Gains in Notch Bands	8 June, 2015	28 October, 2015	5 January, 2016
	Loop-Type Ground Radiation Antenna for a C-Shaped Ground Plane	29 November, 2017	22 March, 2018	19 September, 2018
	Design of a Small Array Antenna with an Extended Cavity Structure for Wireless Power Transmission	14 June, 2019	15 August, 2019	11 September, 2019
Single-blind Review Process
Name of the Journal	Name of the Article	Date Received	Date Revised	Date Accepted
IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters   Scopus Web of Science   https://tinyurl.com/y2lavyhm	A Novel Bidirectional Antenna With Broadband Circularly Polarized Radiation in X-Band	12 November, 2013	-	6 December, 2013
	Circularly Polarized Patch Array Fed by Slotted Waveguide	25 July, 2014	-	25 August, 2014
	Wideband Unidirectional Circularly Polarized Antenna With L-Shaped Radiator Structure	28 September, 2015	18 February, 2016	3 April, 2016
	A Compact Triple-Fed High-Isolation SIW-Based Self-Triplexing Antenna	25 January, 2020	3 March, 2020	4 March, 2020
	A High-Gain Millimeter-Wave Magnetoelectric Dipole Array With Packaged Microstrip Line Feed Network	2 July, 2020	-	25 July, 2020

 

Inference:

• Double-blind peer reviewed journals take more time for publication. 
• Most journals that I came across follow single blind peer review process. 
• The articles in single-blind peer review process, contrary to the other counterpart, rarely had a date for revision and were accepted soon after submission. This shows that journals with double-blind peer review process are more thorough with the quality of the content 

Research Metrics

Research Metrics

 

Research Metrics

Research metrics refer to the tools used to measure the overall influence of an article or a researcher. They are crucial to analyse the reach of a discipline and a journal. It is a set of key quantitative tools that are often taken as indicatives of quality as well.

 

Based on transparency of calculation these metrics can be classified into:

1.     Open Ranking Metrics: The metrics whose calculations are openly accessible to everyone are open ranking measures.

2.     Closed Ranking Metrics: The metrics whose calculations are openly accessible to everyone are open ranking measures.

 

Based on the impact of author or the work itself these metrics can be classified into:

1.     Journal Metrics: That measure the influence of a journal or the field of study itself.

•         Impact Factor (By Clarivate Analytics): For two consecutive years, the average number of times            articles from a journal have been cited.

                                                         

•         5-year Impact Factor (By Clarivate Analytics): For five consecutive years, the average number of         times articles from a journal have been cited.

• CiteScore (By Scopus): For two consecutive years, the average number of times articles from a journal have been cited.

• SCImago Journal Rank (SJR)
• Source Normalised Impact per Paper (SNIP)

2.     Author Metrics: That indicate the influence of a researcher.

•  h-index
• g-index
•  m-index
• i10 index
• h5 index
• h5 median index

 

Validity of metrics

·       The term ‘Bibliometrie’ was coined by Belgian Librarian Paul Otlet in 1934. Later, Pritchard in 1969 coined the English term ‘Bibliometrics’. The idea behind bibliometrie or bibliometrics was to quantify the reach and traction of a literature. This further evolved into ‘Scientometrics’ for scientific literature and ‘Informetrics’. The guiding principles however remained the same.

 

·       Every researcher seeks validation and encouragement. However attractive these metrics may seem; they are purely quantitative indicators and rarely assess the quality. Publication count and citations face several challenges. Gratuitous co-authoring, dynamic practices of publication across disciplines and dearth of experts and academia for emerging fields are the toughest challenges so far.

 

·       It is assumed that the citation of a document is an indicator of its quality as well. It should be kept in mind that not all great articles are accessible and hence might not be well cited. All the articles cited in an article might not be of equal importance. The current measures fail to address this varied level of importance of an article independently.

 

What can be done?

·       For a holistic assessment, each parameter should not be looked at independently but together. A combination of these methods will help clear the picture and assess better.

 

·       Altmetrics is a novel emerging approach that makes use of social media to assess the impact. It is a dynamic metric that reads web-based activity like number of downloads, shares, mentions, bookmarks. However, it proves effective for open source articles better. It is in no way a substitute but a supplement to existing metrics. A similar approach can be developed and employed for qualitative analysis.

 

Case Study

 

Journal Name	Metrics for 2019
	Indexing	Impact Factor	CiteScore	5-year Impact Factor	SNIP	SJR
IET Microwaves Antennas & Propagation	Web of Science   Scopus	1.972	4	1.969	1.173	0.705
International Journal of Antennas and Propagation	Web of Science   Scopus	1.207	2.3	-	0.673	0.278

 

 

CiteScore Calculation:

Journal Name	Total Citations (2016-2019)	Total Documents (2016-2019)	CiteScore
IET Microwaves Antennas & Propagation	4958	1229	4.0
International Journal of Antennas and Propagation	1795	773	2.3