Virtually all rankings of journals are based on citations, including self citations by journals and individual academics. The gold standard for bibliometric rankings based on citations data is the widely-used Thomson Reuters Web of Science (2014) citations database, which publishes, among...

The paper analyses academic journal quality and impact using quality weighted citations that are based on the widely-used Thomson Reuters ISI Web of Science citations database (ISI). A recently developed Index of Citations Quality (ICQ), based on quality weighted citations, is used to analyse...

The premise underlying the use of citations data is that higher quality journals generally have a higher number of citations. The impact of citations can be distorted in a number of ways. Journals can, and do, inflate the number of citations through self citation practices, which may be...