Clarivate Information

Suppression as a form of liberation? On Monday 29th June 2020, I learned from Retraction Watch that Clarivate, the for-profit proprietor of Journal Impact Factor ™ has newly suppressed 33 journals from their indexing service. The immediate consequence of this suppression is that these 33 journals do not get assigned an official Clarivate Journal Impact Factor ™ . Clarivate justify this action on the basis of anomalous citation patterns but without much further detail given for each of the journals other than the overall % Self-cites of the journal, and the effect of those self-cites on Clarivates citation-based ranking of journals (% Distortion of category rank). Amongst the 33 journals, I spotted not one but two systematics journals that I know very well: I have read, cited, and analysed (textmining and image analysis) articles from both of these journals extensively. Chapter 6 of my PhD thesis mined over 12,000 Zootaxa articles looking for phylogenetic data. In a more recent work published in Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO Journal), I mined over 5,800 IJSEM articles for phylogenetic tree data. Of relevance, I should also say I was a council member of the Systematics Association for many years. Given the experiences listed above, I am therefore very well placed to say that what Clarivate has done to these two systematics journals is utter brainless idiocy. The reason why Zootaxa articles cite quite a high proportion of other Zootaxa articles is obvious (self-citation at the journal-level from Clarivates point-of-view) to anyone in the discipline. Zootaxa is an important megajournal for the zoological systematics community. According to lens.org data Zootaxa published over 5,000 items (articles and monographs) between 2018 and 2019. Clarivates own records from another one of their proprietary analytics services called Zoological Record indicate that 26.57% of all new zoological taxa are published in Zootaxa. For many decades descriptive taxonomy has been pushed-out of for-profit journals. Zootaxa is a vital ...