Abstract
Purpose :
The exponential growth of ophthalmology research can be challenging to keep up with and little has been done to systematically identify core ophthalmology journals. Bradford’s law of scattering is a widely used and robust distribution pattern applied to characterize three zones of usefulness for scientific journals. We performed an online-based cross-sectional bibliometric analysis using Bradford’s law to characterize core journals in ophthalmology, representing the first application of Bradford’s law to ophthalmology literature.
Methods :
Two sets of top 10 National Library of Medicine indexed ophthalmology journals based on h-index and impact factor (IF) were combined to create top 14 journals used for analysis. The references from all articles (excluding letters to the editor and editorials) published in these journals, in one randomized quarter in the past three calendar years at the time of research (2022), were compiled into a citation rank list, with the most cited journal ranked the highest. Bradford’s law was applied to identify zonal distribution of journals that obey the distribution of c:ck:ck2. Analysis was performed using Microsoft® Excel (Version 16.64).
Results :
A total of 3093 journals containing 34633 articles were cited in ophthalmology literature from July-Sept 2022. Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci was the most cited journal containing 2380 citations. IF is significantly associated with h-index for the top 20 journals (P<0.001) and top 10 ophthalmology journals (P=0.017). H-index is significantly associated with number of citations for top 10 ophthalmology journals (P<0.001). Three zones obeying Bradford’s law were identified, with zone 1 (core) containing 6 journals and 8410 citations, zone 2 containing 27 journals and 8359 citations, zone 3 containing 154 journals and 8419 citations. A linear relationship between the log journal rank for zones 1-3 and cumulative number of citations was found (R2=0.996), validating Bradford’s law.
Conclusions :
Six core ophthalmology journals were identified based on Bradford’s law: Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci, Ophthalmology, Am J Ophthalmol, JAMA Ophthalmol, Br J Ophthalmol, J Cataract Refract Surg. Considering the ever-increasing research and number of journals in ophthalmology, these highly cited core journals are useful for those trying to keep up with the latest advances in ophthalmology research.
This abstract was presented at the 2023 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in New Orleans, LA, April 23-27, 2023.