An analysis on the evaluation indexes of core journal and its improving effect on journal influence: a case study of Hydrogeology & Engineering Geology

There are many evaluation activities based on Bradford’s Law of Document Dentrailzation for journals, including the selection of “core journals”, ranking of influence, etc. Correctly grasping the origin and development of each journal evaluation system and understanding its function, indexes and their calculation method are still of great practical significance for optimizing the idea, adjusting the direction of running periodicals and improving the quality of periodicals. The paper introduces the evaluation systems of Chinese Core Journals and Chinese Science and Technology Core Journals and their indexes of 2017 edition. On the basis of analyzing the ranking and scoring of Hydrogeology & Engineering Geology in these two systems, it is believed that the main factors determining the influence of periodicals are not only the quality of articles, but also the normative style of articles and the indexes related to the quoted amount. Statistical analysis of the data of the 1 a and 10 a publications of the journal of Hydrogeology & Engineering Geology showing that there are some problems including the scattered subjects, lack of high-impact articles, abstract of insufficient information and non-standard key words. In allusion to these problems above, the measures to improve the influence of the journals are proposed:(1) The publication must adhere to a certain discipline direction and characteristics, and reasonably control the subject distribution; (2) standardizing the style of the article, improving the quality of the article, absorbing high-impact papers, and attracting high-quality manuscripts from different fields of science; (3) strengthening the quality of the abstracts, especially in part of the english abstract , expanding the information content, and promoting the dissemination the internationalization of journals; (4) standardizing the keywords to increase the probability of being retrieved.