TSUKUBA index 1.1 – ICR : Consortium of Human and Social Sciences for International and Comparative Research, University of Tsukuba (original) (raw)

Foreword to Tsukuba index 1.1

Head of Humanities & Social Science Evaluation Research Field
Faculty of Humanities and Social Science
Vice President / Director of the University Library
Jun Ikeda

iMD developed by Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Tsukuba, allows us to measure the diversity of an academic journal in terms of contributors’ affiliation. Journals not included in citation database have been underrepresented in research evaluations including world university rankings. iMD paves the way for journals in all languages, countries and fields to be counted in research evaluations.

We posted Tsukuba index Public Beta on this website on December 1st, 2017. On the same day, we held a symposium about the index, and received quite a few opinions and comments about its benefits and possibilities from the panelists as well as participants. We posted Tsukuba index 1.0, which reflects these opinions and comments, on March 30, 2018. In February 2019, we organized another symposium “Research Metrics in Humanities and Social Sciences: From Seeds to Needs,” and received valuable feedback. We are happy to announce that we have posted Tsukuba index 1.1 with the narrowed list of journals. We welcome your suggestions and ideas for further improvement.

About iMD*

*Trademark registration [No. 6249662]

*Patent registration [No. 7004997]

• iMD is a revised version of the “Diversity Factor” (DF) outlined in Ikeda & Morimoto 2015, according to which “current citation-based metrics manages to capture only a fraction of the actual research performance in the field of humanities and social sciences.”
• DF is calculated by the following formula: (A+C)/I, where ‘A’ stands for the number of distinct Affiliations of the annual contributors, ‘C’ for the number of distinct Countries in which these institutions are located, and ‘I’ for the number of Issues published in a given year. DF as such quantifies the diversity of contributors per issue in terms of their affiliation and international distribution.
• The revised version of DF has been called “iMD” (index for Measuring Diversity), and is calculated by the following formula: log_n_ (_α_×C+_β_×A), where ‘C’ and ‘A’ stand for the same numbers as above, while α and β are parameters to assign weighting to C and A. To assign the same weighting to C and A, one may assign the value 1 to both α and β. To assign A twice the weighting of C, one may assign the value 1 to α, and 2 to β . iMD thus quantifies the diversity of contributors to an academic journal or the like per year in terms of their affiliation and international distribution with any weighting one likes. The logarithmic scale has been adopted in the revised version, because it reduces wide-ranging numbers of A to smaller ranges.
• Calculating iMD has been made simple by this web tool (available only in Japanese).

Reference

Yukihito Morimoto, Jun Ikeda, Japan’s first open research publication service, Information Science and Technology, 2023, Volume 73, Issue 1, p. 21-25, Published on 01/01/2023, Online ISSN 2189-8278, Print ISSN 0913-3801, https://doi.org/10\. 18919/jkg.73.1_21, https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jkg/73/1/73_21/_article/-char/ja (embargo period of 6 months)

Jun Ikeda and Yukihito Morimoto, Research Metrics for the Rest of Us, Inter Faculty 6 (2015), 95-98. https://journal.hass.tsukuba.ac.jp/interfaculty/article/view/99

Organizations which have introduced iMD into their research evaluation:

• Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Tsukuba
• Faculty of Human Sciences, University of Tsukuba

About TSUKUBA index

• TSUKUBA index is a list of iMD values that we calculated. We hereby publish TSUKUBA index 1.1, which incorporates tentative iMD of 137 journals from Web of Science (based on the data provided by Clarivate Analytics) as well as publications by the members of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Tsukuba.

This is protptype, and we welcome suggestions and ideas for improvement. Please email us at imd@icrhs.tsukuba.ac.jp for suggestions and/or questions.