Journal impact and proximity: An assessment using bibliographic features

Journals in the Information Science & Library Science category of Journal Citation Reports (JCR) were compared using both bibliometric and bibliographic features. Data collected covered journal impact factor (JIF), number of issues per year, number of authors per article, longevity, editorial board membership, frequency of publication, number of databases indexing the journal, number of aggregators providing full-text access, country of publication, JCR categories, Dewey decimal classification, and journal statement of scope. Three features significantly correlated with JIF: number of editorial board members and number of JCR categories in which a journal is listed correlated positively; journal longevity correlated negatively with JIF. Coword analysis of journal descriptions provided a proximity clustering of journals, which differed considerably from the clusters based on editorial board membership. Finally, a multiple linear regression model was built to predict the JIF based on all the collected bibliographic features.