Perspectives of Scientometric Evaluation of Popular Scientific Journals

Popular scientific journals have a special part in a wide range of different periodicals due to their popularization targets, large readership varying from pupils to researchers, special design, style and language aimed at making understandable the most complicated information. Therefore, studying popular scientific journals comprises the analyses of their special features, e.g., genre, typography, linguistic, and so on. Much less frequently one uses scientometric tools primarily applied to the study of academic journals. The paper aims at evaluation of possibilities of bibliometrics and altmetrics to studying popular scientific serials using the Russian Science Citation Index database. We took an example of popular scientific journal “Science First Hand” published by the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences to analyze authorship models, geographical distribution of authors, subject areas, citation rate and usage statistics of published papers. Scientometric approach is believed to be promising tool to evaluate popular scientific journals, as it enables us to detect such features of papers, as their interdisciplinarity, single-author publication model, high level of expertise among authors, as well as good compliance with publication ethics requirements. 

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