Core journals and elite subsets in scientometrics

The core journals in scientometrics were determined by the frequency of papers in journals in the elite publication subsets (i.e. most frequently cited publications) of Price medallists. It is supposed that scientometric impact indicators derived from elite subsets may represent the impact of total publication activity more appropriately than the indices referring to whole sets. It is assumed further that prominent scientists publish their papers of potentially high impact in the leading journals of the field. The size of the elite subsets was determined by h, pi, pi v, MCR, and HCP-statistics. MCR is the mean citation rate of publications in a total set, whereas HCP means here papers at least with 100 citations. According to MCR or HCP statistics those papers belong to the corresponding elite subset of which citation frequency is equal to or higher than the mean of the corresponding set or 100, resp. The combined set of papers in 11 core journals of scientometrics was analysed. The number of papers in the elite subsets and their mean citation rate was calculated. The size of the studied elite subsets ranges from 30 to 225. The mean citation rate of the journal papers in the different elite subsets was found to decrease as the size of the elite subset increased. The publications in the field of scientometrics were collected also by keywords: scientometric, bibliometric, informetric, and webometric, from WoS. The mean citation rate of papers in the elite subsets was found significantly higher for those published in journals covering non-scientometric topics (e.g. Nature, Science, British Medical Journal, PLOS One, etc.). The high rate of papers in the elite subsets published by Price medallists may validate the selection of these sets for evaluation purposes. In most cases, any of the studied elite subsets may be used for publication evaluation.