H-index of East Asian Studies Journals according to Google Scholar Metrics (2012-2016)

Abstract

This report presents a ranking of East Asian Studies (EAS) journals indexed by Google Scholar Metrics (GSM) during the 2012-2016 period. Being the fifth in a collection of working papers that has covered the same data since the 2008-2012 period, it represents an update of the ranking and can be used to compare the evolution of the journals as far as h-index is concerned. GSM poses a series of methodological problems as a bibliometric tool. First, it does not currently allow grouping and sorting all journals belonging to a scientific discipline, but only shows the 20 journals with the greatest impact by topic, which is measured using the h-index. Second, it only lists journals according to academic disciplines if they are written in English. Last but not least, the nearest area to East Asian Studies offered by GSM is "Asian Studies & History". Therefore the list of the 20 most cited journals has a clear bias towards the Social Sciences and does not include many EAS journals with a higher h-index. In order to overcome the above-mentioned limitations, librarians from the Library of Humanities at Autonomous University of Barcelona used a diversity of search procedures to identify title by title the greatest number of EAS journals possible. This search was carried out in September 2017, using keywords in different languages (including Chinese, Korean and Japanese) and Boolean operators. However, from an initial list of 170 titles provided by the Department of Translation and Interpreting and East Asian Studies of the same university, only 86 titles had a h5-index, which means that GSM only covers 50,6% of all active EAS journals. In this sense, it must be reminded that GSM only takes into account journals that have published at least 100 articles during the analysed period and that have received at least one citation. Journals are sorted according to their h5-index in descending order. In case of draw, the discriminating value is the h5-median