Need to categorize journals for assessing quality of publications

摘要

Lakhotia is perhaps right in stating that categorization of journals into national and international by the University Grants Commission needs to be relooked and the judgement on the quality of publications based on the journal impact factor (IF) is to be avoided. A distinction between national and international journals seems unreasonable because of the overlap among the journals published by many associations and publishing houses. Merely adding an adjective'International' cannot qualify a journal to become truly International and merely a name based on a particular country cannot make it national as well. For example, the Geological Society of America Bulletin has an IF of 3.8. Will it come under nationalor international category? Similar is the case with the Journal of the Geological Society, London. The journal IF emerged in the 1970s as a tool to rank journals. Currently, it is a tool to assess the quality of publications and that of a scientist. TheIF is based on the number of citations which is at times manipulated by authors of the papers and editors of the journals. Thus, this cannot be taken as a measure of the quality of publication, unless citations of individual publications are assessed. Also, even a good publication may receive a sizable citation after many years of its publication.