Recent growth of scientific journals published in India: Some publishing and citation-related characteristics

Using bibliometric data collected from journal citation reports (JCRs) covering the period 2008-2011, trends of the growth of scientific journals published in India, self-citation characteristics of their 2-year impact factors (IF2s) with and without self-citations and the relationship between their 2- and 5-year impact factors (IF5) are examined. The main findings of the study are that: (1) A majority of the top Indian journals belong to medical and medicinal sciences and are published by dominating publishers like MedKnow, Indian Academy of Sciences, National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources (NISCAIR), and Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), whereas most of the bottom journals were published by scientific societies, associations, centers and other individual publishers, (2) Many of the journals were included in the JCR indexing system only recently but their ranking in the IF2 order strongly depends on the publication duration, (3) With their increasing publication duration, the values of IF2 and IF5 of the top journals increase, whereas those of the bottom journals decrease, (4) the frequency f_P = P/N of distribution of self-citation octiles P = IF2_nsc/IF2 and the frequence f_F = F/N of IF2 octiles F for different years, where IF2_nsc is the 2-year impact factor of a journal without self-citations and N is the number of journals with IF2 in a given year, follow exponential dependence, and (5) IF5 > IF2 for most of the journals but the proportion of journals where IF5 > IF2 varies enormously in different years.