Citation Performance of Malaysian Scholarly Journals in the Web of Science, 2006–2010

There are several ways for the international scientific community to recognize the quality of a scholarly journal. Although controversial, the most widely used and reliable methodology to identify the importance of a journal is through the citation it receives. This paper identifies the performance of scholarly journals published by Malaysian publishers in the Web of Science and reports the number of citations to Malaysian journals in terms of the cited and the citing journals. A search using the Thomson-Reuters citation database (Web of Science) was performed to identify highly cited Malaysian journals from 2006 to 2010. We identified 212 cited journals that received 9675 cited-papers, and a total of 9427 articles contributing to the 3184 journals citing Malaysian journals. More than fifty percent of all the articles that cited Malaysian journals were published in journals ranked in the first or second quartile by the Journal Citation Report. Further analysis was done on the top 50 cited and citing journal titles. A steady growth of citations with a total increase of 56.9% was evident between the five year period examined.

► We identify the Malaysian journals’ performance in the Web of Science (WoS) in terms of the cited and the citing journals. ► Articles having citations to Malaysian journals are low, but it is significant, as only 9 Malaysian journals are in WoS. ► A steady growth of citations was also evident between the five year period. ► Malaysian journals are being cited as a credible source in high-ranked journals in the Journal Citation Report. ► Journal publishers may gauge their citedness in WoS to further improve their quality and ultimately gain indexation in WoS.