A comparison of journal similarity across six disciplines using citing discipline analysis

•We examine how citing journal disciplines may be used to model journal similarity.•WoS Research Areas are used to represent citing journal disciplines.•Six disciplinary areas (five related, one more distant) are studied.•Multidimensional scaling and Principal Component Analysis outcomes reveal coherent groups.•The presented method offers a complementary approach to co-citation analysis.

A similarity comparison is made between 120 journals from five allied Web of Science disciplines (Communication, Computer Science-Information Systems, Education & Educational Research, Information Science & Library Science, Management) and a more distant discipline (Geology) across three time periods using a novel method called citing discipline analysis that relies on the frequency distribution of Web of Science Research Areas for citing articles. Similarities among journals are evaluated using multidimensional scaling with hierarchical cluster analysis and Principal Component Analysis. The resulting visualizations and groupings reveal clusters that align with the discipline assignments for the journals for four of the six disciplines, but also greater overlaps among some journals for two of the disciplines or categorizations that do not necessarily align with their assigned disciplines. Some journals categorized into a single given discipline were found to be more closely aligned with other disciplines and some journals assigned to multiple disciplines more closely aligned with only one of the assigned disciplines. The proposed method offers a complementary way to more traditional methods such as journal co-citation analysis to compare journal similarity using data that are readily available through Web of Science.