Publication Metrics and Subject Categories of Biomechanics Journals

Abstract

Research in interdisciplinary fields like biomechanics is published in a variety of journals whose visibility depends on bibliometric indexing that is often driven by citation analysis of bibliometric databases. This study documented variation in publication metrics and research subject categories assigned to 14 biomechanics journals. Authors, citation, and citation rate (CR) were collected for the top 15 cited articles in the journals retrieved from the Google Scholar service. Research subject categories were also extracted for journals from three databases (Dimensions, Journal Citation Reports, and Scopus). Despite the focus on biomechanics for the journals studied, these biomechanics journals have widely varying CR and subject categories assigned to them. There were significant (p=0.001) and meaningful (77-108%) differences in median CR between average, low, and high CR groups of these biomechanics journals. Since CR are primary data used to calculate most journal metrics and there is no one biomechanics subject category, field normalization for journal citation metrics in biomechanics is difficult. Care must be taken to accurately interpret most citation metrics of biomechanics journals as biased proxies of general usage of research, given a specific database, time frame, and area of biomechanics research.