Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Apr 17, 2024
Date Accepted: Nov 13, 2024
Evaluation and Comparison of the Academic Quality of Open Access Mega Journals and Authoritative Journals: Disruptive Innovation Evaluation
ABSTRACT
Background:
Some scholars who are skeptical of the Open Access Mega Journal (OAMJ) have argued that low-quality papers often find it difficult to be published in more prestigious and authoritative journals and that the OAMJ may be the main destination for their publication.
Objective:
In order to assess the academic quality of OAMJ scientifically and reasonably, and considering the important position of OAMJ in clinical medicine, this paper selects the authoritative journals and the representative OAMJs related to this field as the research object. Compare and analyze the difference in the disruptive innovation level between the two. Explore for which countries and research directions OAMJs provides publication channels for disruptive innovations.
Methods:
In the actual study, the required journal information, literature information and open citation relationship data were obtained from Journal Citation Reports (JCR), Web of Science (WoS), InCites and the OpenCitations Index of PubMed open PMID-to-PMID citations (POCI), respectively. Then calculated the disruptive innovation level of the focus paper.
Results:
The study found: (1) The mean value of the JDI for the selected authoritative journals and OAMJ was 0.5866 and 0.0255, respectively. There was a significant difference between them. (2) Only 1.48% of the OAMJ papers were able to reach the median level of disruptive innovation of authoritative journal papers (MDAJ), but the absolute number has been roughly equal to that of authoritative journals. (3) Meanwhile, the absolute number of innovative papers published by OAMJs exceeds that of authoritative journals in 24 research directions such as Allergy, accounting for 40.68% of the number of all research directions in clinical medicine. (4) The number of papers published in authoritative journals and the average level of disruptive innovation in each country showed a linear relationship after logarithmic treatment, with a correlation coefficient of -0.891. While the number of papers published in OAMJs in each country and the average level of disruptive innovation did not show a linear relationship after logarithmic treatment.
Conclusions:
Although the average disruptive innovation level of papers published by OAMJ is far from that of authoritative journals, it has become an important publication channel for innovative results in several research directions. OAMJs has also provided a fairer opportunity for the publication of innovative results in developing countries. Therefore, the academic community should correctly view the contribution and value of OAMJ to scientific research.
Citation
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Copyright
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