Background

Ciencias Marinas (CM) journal was established in September 1973 at the then known Marine Science Unit (UCM, for its Spanish acronym), which comprised the School of Marine Science (now Faculty of Marine Science) and the Oceanographic Research Institute (IIO for its Spanish acronym), at the Autonomous University of Baja California (Mexico). However, the first issue was not published until June 1974. The original idea for creating the journal was to initiate UCM scholars in the peer-review publishing culture, which is why the journal initially included 2 sections: one for original contributions and the second for reproductions of papers published by UCM scholars. The latter section was eventually eliminated, and the journal has since included only original papers. Currently, CM is an international peer-reviewed bilingual (English and Spanish) journal that is edited and published by IIO, with all its contents comprising open-access scientific papers on research in all areas of marine science.

In 1999 the journal was accepted for inclusion in Current Contents, a database owned by the Institute for Scientific Information (now owned by Clarivate Analytics). This inclusion was a major steppingstone to measuring the worldwide impact of CM by means of the impact factor, one of the first approximations to measuring the impact of journals in the scholarly community. In 2006 the first online version of CM was published, with open access to all its contents via the open-source Open Journal Systems (OJS) platform made available by the Public Knowledge Project. To commemorate CM’s 45th anniversary, we evaluated the growth of the journal since its inception and since it was included in the 2 most internationally important bibliometric databases, Clarivate Analytics and Scopus.

Analysis

To establish changes in growth, we analyzed 8 different bibliometric indicators pertaining to CM. The use of different indicators follows the premise that journal performance should not be evaluated using one indicator alone, since every indicator has inherent advantages and disadvantages (^{Pendlebury 2008}, ^{Haustein 2012}). It is especially important to highlight that while interpretation of some of these 8 bibliometric indicators can be controversial given the subjectivity of some of their premises, the ease of manipulation, and the lack of transparency, other indicators are relatively objective, transparent and easy to calculate (^{Browman and Stergiou 2008}, ^{Lawrence 2008}, ^{Haustein 2012}). Therefore, we deemed the use of a joint analysis of different indicators that signaled different appraisals but were also complementary fitting for an objective assessment. The different analyses are based on information taken from Web of Science (owned by Clarivate Analytics), Scopus (owned by Elsevier), SCImago, and the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS, for its Dutch acronym). The first 2 sources provide bibliometric indices for scholarly journals based on their own databases and the other 2 provide indicators based on the Scopus database. It is worth noting that, in its analyses, Clarivate Analytics considers only original articles and review articles (“citable items,” ^{Garfield 2006}), whereas other indicators derived from the Scopus database are more inclusive in their coverage, accounting for books and editorials, for example. For our analyses, coverage by these databases dates from the year CM was accepted for inclusion (mostly 1997) to 2017. The indicators we used for this study were the following:

Per our records, CM has published 1,339 documents since its inception. This number does not include comments/replies or any editorials; it only includes research papers, review papers, and research notes. According to the Clarivate Analytics database, coverage for CM dates back to 1997 and includes 763 “citable items.” In 2017 coverage included 18 “citable items,” for which authors represented affiliations from 19 different countries (Table 1), with the highest contribution from Mexico (45) and the United States (10). The JIF for CM (Fig. 1a) showed variability over time (1997-2017), with the lowest reported value for 1997 (0.167) and the highest for 2017 (1.049). However, this indicator exhibited an overall increasing trend with a mean rate of approximately 0.029 units per year, showing the highest values for 2008 (1.038; 2 years after CM was first published online) and for 2017. The percentage of international collaboration has also increased continuously over time (Fig. 1b), with a mean increasing trend of approximately 1.55% per year. However, international collaboration showed an important decrease during 2 periods: from 1999 to 2001 (3 consecutive years), with values decreasing from 18.92% to 0.0%, and from 2010 to 2013 (4 consecutive years), with values decreasing from 36.36% to 18.18% (Fig. 1b). For 2017, the latest reported year for CM, percent international collaboration was sensibly 50.00%. The total number of citations (Fig. 1b) has also gradually increased over time, and this increase has surprisingly shown a linear pattern over the 20-year period, from 1997 to 2017 (r ² = 0.94), with a nearly constant rate of 29.9 ± 1.77 cites per year and values ranging from 97 (1997) to 699 (2017) cites per year.

Figure 1 Different bibliometric indicators as a function of time for Ciencias Marinas: (a) impact factor (JIF; Clarivate Analytics 2018a), source normalized impact per paper (SNIP; ^{CWTS 2018}), and 2-year citations per document (^{SCImago 2018}); (b) percentage of international collaboration and total number of citations (^{Clarivate Analytics 2018a}). 

According to the Scopus database, coverage for CM dates from 1992 to 2018. The total number of CM documents covered by Scopus in the period from the first year of inclusion in the database to 2018 is 965. The journal has maintained an h-index of 24 since 2010. SNIP values for CM (Fig. 1a) also showed variability over time, but in this case increase is not as prominent as that observed for the JIF, since the trend value was only 0.0027 units per year. The highest SNIP values (≥0.60) were attained in 2000, 2006, 2014, and 2017, whereas he lowest values (0.26) were reached in 2007. Moreover, from Figure 1a we can see that citations per document have increased over time, going from 0.363 in 1999 to 1.047 in 2017, with an annual trend of approximately 0.030 cites per document.

For CiteScore and SJR, the coverage window was narrower than that for the other indicators used in this study, covering the periods 2011-2017 and 2010-2017, respectively. Despite the relatively narrow coverage, we observed a temporal increase in CiteScore values that went from 0.45 in 2011 to 1.08 in 2017, although CiteScore values slightly decreased from 2015 to 2016 (Fig. 2). On the other hand, SJR has not changed significantly since 2010 as the value for this year was 0.381 and for 2017 it was 0.414, indicating an increase of only 8%.

Figure 2 CiteScore (Elsevier 2019) and SCImago Journal Rank (SJR; SCImago 2018) as a function of time for Ciencias Marinas. 

Almost all indicators used to assess the overall growth of CM showed positive results, except SNIP (Fig. 1a) and SJR (Fig. 2), which indicate relatively poor progress. Interestingly, the indicators based on “citable items” did indicate progress. CM has gone a long way since it was published for the first time. It leapt from being a local project to becoming an international journal. Many improvements have been adapted to the journal, to the extent possible, as scholarly publishing has evolved. In Mexico, CM is one of the journals with the highest advances in scholarly publishing. It has been covered by the National Council for Science and Technology (CONACYT) Mexican Journal Classification System as an acknowledgment to its excellent editorial quality. According to this classification system, CM is one of the few Mexican journals in the CONACYT Biology and Chemistry category that is indexed by international bodies (^{CONACYT 2016}). In all, in our assessment of the growth of CM over the past ~20 years since it was included in the 2 most important worldwide bibliographic databases we can say that CM has had some progress; still more improvements have yet to be made to make CM a more respectful highly sought-after journal at an international level.