Suppression of Scholarly Journals: A Case Study of Journal Citation Reports during 2010 to 2014

Journals indexed by the Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science (WOS) are temporarily suppressed from the Journal Citation Reports, if they manipulate their impact factor and present extreme outliers in citation behavior through excessive self-citations and citation stacking with other journals. The current research aims to investigate the different characteristics of the suppressed journals by Clarivate Analytics, in a five-year time span (from 2010 to 2014).

The current study is an applied research in terms of objectives while it is a descriptive study in terms of data analysis and conducted using scientometric indicators. Research population comprised of 225 suppressed journals from the Journal Citation Reports during 2010-2014. Data was collected from the Journal Citation Reports and Web of Science.

Results of the study revealed that at least one journal from 177 different subject categories were suppressed during 2010 to 2014. The highest number of title suppressions was belonging to electronics and electrical engineering, management and artificial intelligence. Of the interesting findings of the research is the low presence of medical journals in the suppressed lists. Investigating the share of world countries showed that the United States, United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Germany had the greatest number of suppressions. 41.3 percent and 38.2 percent of the journals were suppressed for one and two years, respectively. Moreover, 65 percent of the suppressed journals were ranked in the first and second quartiles of their subject categories a year before suppression. Even some journals were the first journals in their categorical ranking of JCR before suppression.  

In the five-year period of this study, 32 countries were engaged in journal suppression by having at least one suppressed journal. Notably, the most frequent language of the suppressed journals was English that can be interpreted and about half of the suppressed journals belonged to authoritative international publications like Sage, Wiley-Blackwell, Taylor and Francis, Springer and Routledge. Of course, almost 80 percent of the suppressed titles could meet the Clarivate Analytics criteria again and remove the suppression after two years.Considering the fact that two Iranian journals had the record of suppression, awareness of the researchers and journals’ editorial board members of the country as well as regular monitoring of the journals’ citation performance may avoid occurrence of suppressions in the future.