Métricas para aferir o crescimento informacional dos periódicos científicos na WEB

Abstract

The technological growth and the emergence of diverse information sources available on the Internet demand diverse ways of measuring scientific production. In this context, it is observed the need to analyze the use of different kinds of tools and metrics to measure the use of information that is being available on the Internet, especially in scientific journals because they are publications with recognized quality. This way, it was developed a qualitative and quantitative study with electronic journals about Information Science that permitted to identify the metrics to monitor and control the production of scientific knowledge, such as: impact factor; h-index, g-index, number of citations, among others. Also, it was done a survey in the main databases like CAPES Periodical Portal, Scopus, PKP, DOAJ and JCR. The choice has as a determinant factor the main indexer, the Google Scholar, once it is an easily accessible tool and it is one of the most used tools in this kind of analysis. It was analyzed the use of each journal in the last five years. The list of journals follows the ascending rank order proposed by Qualis, considering the number of citations that each journal received in the period from 2010 to 2015. From thirty-eight journals identified in the area of Information Science, the tool and three, despite the indication that were indexed in their websites, were not found in the base, indexed four of them. The realization of this research enabled to note the preoccupation that the scientific community has in relation to quality and the information use of scientific journals on the web. However, it was verified that there is still lack of knowledge about the use of tools, of the indicators used in the metrics, and a lack of understanding that these are elements that attribute reliability in the information contained on electronic scientific journals.