HPS for All in Journal's Metrics

As the current editorial team completed a 4-year term since taking on the management of Science & Education with the 2020 volume, it is useful to reflect on what the journal has accomplished during this timeframe. The purpose of this reflection is not to offer an exhaustive analysis of the journal’s performance in relation to metrics but rather to use such metrics to understand if and how the journal might have addressed some aspects of the editorial vision, namely, to widen the appeal of history, philosophy, and sociology of science (HPS) within the broader science education research community.

Annually, data are released about the journals’ performance by Clarivate Analytics which is a company that maintains Web of Science, a research database that provides access to scholarly articles, conference proceedings, and other research materials. Web of Science is widely used for citation analysis and to determine the impact factors of academic journals. In many countries, the citation information is used for assessing the quality of academics’ publications and thereby research performance. Clarivate provides detailed information about a journal’s citation performance measured by impact factor (IF). Science & Education is indexed in two categories: Education & Educational Research, and History and Philosophy of Science. The journal’s recent history of IF in both categories is  illustrated in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1

Impact factor trends for Science & Education Journal

The progression of the journal’s impact factors and other indicators are represented in Table 1. Data for 2023 are not yet available. There are two measures for IF: 2-year IF and 5-year IF. For example, the 2-year IF value for 2022 is 2.8, placing the journal at position 104 among 269 journals in the SSCI (Social Science Citation Index) category for Education and Educational Research and positioned in Quartile 2 (Q2). According to the Clarivate, “Journal Citation Indicator (JCI) is the average Category Normalized Citation Impact (CNCI) of citable items (articles and reviews) published by a journal over a recent three year period.” (https://clarivate.com). According to this metric, the journal’s ranking has shifted from Q2 to Q1 in 2020. Furthermore, the data indicate that there has been a marked shift, namely, from Q3 to Q2, in the standing of the journal within the SSCI Education and Educational Research category, while its standing within the History and Philosophy of Science has also improved in terms of its overall ranking among the indexed journals while maintaining its top presence as a Q1 journal.

Table 1 Impact factors of Science & Education in the last 4 years

The shift in the education category is worthy of note in relation to the editorial policy of the journal. In my inaugural editorial (Erduran, 2020), I had specified that:

Science & Education has a distinctive responsibility and opportunity to facilitate the understanding of and attitude towards HPS by the broader science education community. How could the impact of HPS be improved in the broader science education community?

The journal metrics need to be taken with a grain of salt, but the journal’s IF performance seems to suggest that a broader set of readership is taking place given the upward trajectory of citations. Upon closer examination where the citations originate, it is expected that a certain proportion of them will come from the journal itself, given the relevance of the previous publications to the research area of HPS. However, for example, for 2 years in a row, the highest number of citations were from the International Journal of Science Education (71 in 2020, 52 in 2021) as compared to those from Science & Education (38 in 2020, 30 in 2021).

Another indicator of the community engagement with the journal is the data on the countries that contributed papers to the journal in the most recent 3-year period. These data are summarised in Table 2. Further analysis is needed to compare and contrast the shifts in the author countries represented across the years within the journal itself, but the representation of the top 10 countries is similar to studies that have investigated a broader set of science education journals (e.g., Tsai & Wen, 2005; Wang et al., 2023). However, it is encouraging to see papers from authors from countries that are typically underrepresented within science education research more broadly (e.g., Morocco, Rwanda, Serbia, Slovakia, Ukraine). In 2022, the total number of downloads of articles from the Science & Education website was 419,048, the highest in the history of the journal. This information can should also be interpreted cautiously as download figures do not necessarily mean readership.

Table 2 Countries of the authors who have contributed papers to the journal from 2020-2022

Overall, the journal’s performance suggests an upward trajectory in terms of the metrics used by Clarivate Analytics. However, the purpose of my brief reference to these metrics is not to evaluate the journal’s performance per se but rather to locate some indicators of impact and uptake of HPS-related scholarship in the broader science education research community. For those scholars who are already convinced of the merit of HPS for science education, the journal will always provide a venue for sharing research and learning from HPS. Indeed, the consistently outstanding impact of the journal in the HPS related metrics (i.e., continuing presence as a Q1 journal with an upward ranking across the years) is reassuring about the HPS community's engagement with the journal. The challenge is to reach out to those who are not entirely convinced that HPS has any use or relevance for science education. It is in this spirit that the editorial processes of Science & Education have encouraged and supported HPS for all, such that HPS expertise does not impart monopoly on who does HPS-related research in science education but rather that a diversity of HPS themes can be questioned and adopted by all science education researchers as and when needed to understand how to enhance science education. Some aspects of the journal’s metrics suggest that the broader science education research community is engaging with HPS scholarship represented in the journal.