Theory and Practice of Logic Programming
and the ISI Web of Knowledge
Maurice Bruynooghe
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Belgium
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Editor:
Enrico Pontelli
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We are living in a time where university administrators are
increasingly relying on various measurements to assess the quality of
research. After all, we cannot expect they read our own research papers
to make a personal judgement. Whether we like it or not, but in many
places, papers in good journals are a must for research results to be
taken seriously. Typically, university administrators use the ISI web of Knowledge, a product of
the Thomson Corporation, to make the assessment. More precisely, they
make use of the Journal Citation
Report to obtain the impact factor of a journal and to compare
it with the impact factor of other journals in the discipline.
The above explains why giving up the Journal
of Logic Programming out of protest with the excessive pricing
policies of Elsevier was a difficult step. Theory and Practice of Logic Programming
started in 2001 with Cambridge University Press, and being a new
journal, was not included in the ISI reports. Fortunately, with the
backing of SPARC, the Scholarly
Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition,
“an alliance of academic and research libraries and organisations
working to correct market dysfunctions in the scholarly publishing
system”, TPLP appeared already in the 2003 edition of the Journal Citation Report. That was
the first year for which there were enough data to compute a regular
impact factor.
TPLP is the journal of the Logic Programming community; it is important
for the community that it is a thriving journal; members of the
community can contribute to this thriving. One aspect of its thriving
is how well it does in those Journal Citation Reports. In the
remainder, we dwell on the impact factor and on some other information
one can extract from the ISI reports. While many have heard about
impact factor, few precisely know how it is computed.
The impact factor is derived from the publications that are covered by
the ISI database. Important for our community is that (all Proceedings
that appear in) Lecture Notes in Computer Science is included (but not
Proceedings by ACM Press, IEEE Press, Morgan Kaufmann, . . . ).
In the 2003 Journal Citation Report, one finds the following data:
Cites in 2003 to articles published in 2002:
Cites in 2003 to articles published in 2001: |
22
24 |
| Sum: |
46 |
and
Number of articles published in 2002:
Number of articles published in 2001: |
19
22 |
| Sum: |
44 |
The impact factor is obtained by dividing the number of cites by the
number of articles, i.e., 46/44= 1.045. Out of 345 journals listed in
computer science, the ranking of TPLP is 108.
Similarly, in the 2004 Journal Citation Report, one finds:
Cites in 2004 to articles published in 2003:
Cites in 2004 to articles published in 2002: |
40
45 |
| Sum: |
85 |
and
Number of articles published in 2003:
Number of articles published in 2002: |
23
19 |
| Sum: |
42 |
This gives an impact factor of 85/42= 2.024. Out of 347 journals in
computer science, the ranking is 46. (Apparently, the two extra
journals listed in 2004 are Lecture Notes in Computer Science, and
Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence. Although (some? all?)
articles published in them are in the corpus, no impact factors for
LNCS and LNAI are given for 2003 —both are listed in reports
previous to 2003—.)
Note that the impact factors of both years are almost unrelated as the
cites are originating from a different set of data. The only overlap is
in the window of articles whose citations are counted. This window has
a width of two years hence overlaps with one year.
The citation reports also allows one to see which sources are citing
TPLP articles. Lumping together figures from both years, one arrives at
the following table where the column IF
refers to cites that contribute to the impact factor, the column other refers to cites to articles
that are not in the window used for computing the impact factor, and
the column total is the sum
of both.
| Citing journal |
IF |
other |
total |
| Lecture Notes in Compute Science |
60 |
15 |
75 |
| Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence |
24 |
2 |
26 |
| Theory and Practice of Logic Programming |
11 |
6 |
17 |
| Computational Intelligence |
9 |
0 |
9 |
| Fundamenta Informaticae |
4 |
2 |
6 |
| Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence |
4 |
1 |
5 |
| Information and Computation |
2 |
1 |
3 |
| Science of Computer Programming |
3 |
0 |
3 |
| IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering |
2 |
0 |
2 |
| Information Sciences |
2 |
0 |
2 |
| Theoretical Computer Science |
1 |
1 |
2 |
| Advances in Virus Research |
2 |
0 |
2 |
| Others with each 1 citation |
7 |
6 |
13 |
The table shows how dependent the impact factor is on LNCS/LNAI: 84 out
of 131, i.e., more than 75% is due them. Not surprisingly if one
realises that most volumes are Proceedings that, due to the fast
publication cycle, refer to the recent work. In contrast, journal
papers have a much slower publication cycle so that references to
recent work are much less frequent.
Remarkably is that
Advances in Virus Research has 2 references to TPLP. It concerns two
different papers (in Volume 60, 2003) that refer to Yi-Dong
Shen, Li-Yan Yuan, Jia-Huai You, and Neng-Fa Zhou, Linear Tabulated
Resolution Based on Prolog Control Strategy, TPLP, Vol 1(1): 71-103.
I have no online access to that journal and could not check whether
this is indeed the case. However, I could verify that neither Trends in
Biotechnology 23(2) 2005 nor Theoretical and Applied Genetics 109(4),
2004 refer to TPLP as claimed by ISI. However, a paper on Simulating complex intracellular processes
using object oriented computational modelling in Progress in Biophysics & Molecular
Biology
86(3), 2004 does indeed refer
to Andy King and Lunjin Lu, A Backward Analysis for Constraint Logic
Programs, TPLP, Vol 2(4&5) pp 517-547 as claimed by ISI.
There exists also a different kind of errors. Using Cited Reference Search,
I attempted to find all citations to TPLP. I found 182 citations of
which 14 had various errors that caused them not to be linked to the
proper entry (in which case they also cannot contribute to the impact
factor).
| Errors in citations |
occurrences |
| wrong page number: |
7 |
| wrong year: |
2 |
| missing Volume number: |
2 |
| missing page number: |
1 |
| wrong initials in author name: |
1 |
| incomplete initials in author name: |
1 |
Browsing through the
list, I was constructing the following list of most cited papers:
- 12 citations Andy King and Lunjin Lu, A Backward Analysis for
Constraint Logic Programs, Vol 2(4&5) pp 517-547.
- 12 citations Michael Leuschel and Maurice Bruynooghe, Logic
program specialisation through partial deduction: Control issues, Vol
2(4&5) pp 461-515.
- 9 citations James P. Delgrande, Torsten Schaub, Hans Tompits: A
Framework for Compiling Preferences in Logic Programs, Vol 3(2) pp
129-187.
- 9 citations John Grant and Jack Minker, A logic-based approach to
data integration, Vol 2(3) pp 323-368.
- 9 citations Michael J. Maher, Propositional Defeasible Logic has
Linear Complexity, Vol 1(6) pp 691-711.
- 8 citations Michael Leuschel, Jesper Jørgensen, Wim
Vanhoof, Maurice Bruynooghe, Offline specialisation in Prolog using a
hand-written compiler generator, Vol 4(1&2) pp 139-191.
- 8 citations Dino Pedreschi and Salvatore Ruggieri and Jan-Georg
Smaus, Classes of terminating logic programs, Vol 2(3) pp 369-418.
- 7 citations Marcelo Arenas, Leopoldo Bertossi, Jan Chomicki,
Answer Sets for Consistent Query Answering in Inconsistent Databases,
Vol 3(4&5) pp 387-391.
- 7 citations Annalisa Bossi, Nicoletta Cocco, Sandro Etalle and
Sabina Rossi, On modular termination proofs of general logic programs,
Vol 2(3) pp 263-291.
- 7 citations Esra Erdem and Vladimir Lifschitz, Tight logic
programs, Vol 3(4&5) pp 499-518.
- 6 citations Hudson Turner, Strong equivalence made easy: nested
expressions and weight constraints, Vol 3(4&5) pp 609-622
One can ask to sort the list according to source title. LNCS/LNAI does
not appear as a single item, but the list contains (pieces of) titles
of individual volumes. One obtains (only titles with more than 2
citations):
| Source Title |
Record Count |
% of 182 |
| Theory and Practice of Logic Programming |
22 |
12.0 |
| Logic Programming, Proceedings |
11 |
6.0 |
| Logic Based Program Synthesis and Transformation |
10 |
5.5 |
| Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning, Proceedings |
10 |
5.5 |
| Program Development in Computational Logic |
10 |
5.5 |
| Computational Intelligence |
4 |
2.2 |
| Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages, Proceedings |
4 |
2.2 |
| Theoretical Computer Science |
4 |
2.2 |
| Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence |
3 |
1.6 |
| Computational Logic in Multi-Agent Systems |
3 |
1.6 |
| Inconsistency Tolerance |
3 |
1.6 |
| Journal of Logic and Computation |
3 |
1.6 |
| Logics in Artificial Intelligence, Proceedings |
3 |
1.6 |
I assume that Logic Programming,
Proceedings refers to different instances of ICLP. Though
apparently, also here things can go wrong; the list has also an entry Logics Programming, Proceedings
(with two citations) that likely also refers to an ICLP conference.
Conclusion To have a thriving
journal with a good impact factor, its recent papers need be cited. You
can contribute to the standing of TPLP in two ways. One one hand by
submitting important work, either original research (eventually an
elaboration of a conference paper) or survey work that will obtain many
citations. On the other hand by precise citations to (recent) TPLP
papers, in particular when you publish in the LNCS/LNAI series of
Springer. The most up to date information about published and
forthcoming papers are on the ALP website:
Other sources are DBLP:
and Cambridge University Press:
Maurice Bruynooghe
Editor-in-Chief TPLP (until 31 December 2005)
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Department of Computer Science