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Cabells Scholarly Analytics: A Go-To Source onJournal Quality (Review)Paul BlobaumGovernors State University

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Recommended CitationBlobaum, Paul, "Cabells Scholarly Analytics: A Go-To Source on Journal Quality (Review)" (2018). Faculty Research and CreativeActivity. 35.https://opus.govst.edu/faculty/35

A Go-To Authority on Journal Quality

By Blobaum

Cabells international (pronounced "Caw-bulls,"so it sounds closer to "cowbells" than "cables") isa recognized authority on publishing opportunities

(cabells.com). It offersscholars a highly selectivelist of vetted journals andcontains resources toidentify publishing scams.Cabell's Scholarly Analyticsis based on 40 years ofexperience in publishingCabell's Directories of

Publishing Opportunities, its former name. (Incase you are wondering if I don't know how to usepunctuation correctly, the apostrophe was droppedin 2015 in favor of Cabells for branding purposes.)

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C abells has long had aWhitelist and added a multidisci-plinary Blacklist of journals to avoid in 2017. Cabells Wh-itelist covers 18 academic disciplines: Accounting, As-

tronomy, Biological Sciences, Chemistry, Computer Science andBusiness Information Systems, Economics and Finance, Educa-tional Curriculum and Methods, Educational Psychology andAdministration, Educational Technology and Library Science, Ge-ology, Health Administration, Management, Marketing, Mathe-matics, Nursing, Oceanography, Physics, and Psychology and Psy-chiatry. Author services from the publishing services companyEditage are offered and are available upon demand on a pay-as-you go basis. Because Editage is a third-party partner, I focus onlyon Cabells' products for this review.

CABELLS BACKGROUNDCabells' success and authoritative reputation can be at-

tributed to the company's deep understanding of the needsand the practices of academia. The company demonstrates akeen understanding of scholarly communication imperatives(such as publishing in reputable journals) and the pitfalls thatcan damage professional reputations and ruin careers. Origi-nating as a class project for David W. E. Cabell's management

class in 1978, Cabells developed products needed in the aca-demic marketplace BC (before computers) and continues toadd value to them with analytics and author services. Cabells isan essential time-saving and career-saving source for schol-ars—at my university, publishing in Cabells-approved jour-nals weighs heavily in faculty retention, tenure, and promo-tion decisions.

Cabells' genius is its selection criteria (cabells.com/selection-policy2) and publishing its ranking scorecards and direc-tory information on "journal card" entries. (See Figure 1 onpage 22.) The journal card reports publisher names, launchdate, ISSN numbers, audience, discipline, frequency of publi-cation, acceptance rates, open access (OA) status and type(traditional OA, green, gold, hybrid), number of invited arti-cles, links to manuscript preparation guidelines, what publica-tion style is used (Vancouver, APA, etc.), type of review(blind, double-blind, etc.), time it takes for review, the numberand type of reviewers, and time from submission to publica-tion. The availability of reviewers' comments and whether aplagiarism detection tool is utilized by the journal is indicated.Cabells reports the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) impact fac-tors, if available, and links to the publisher's website.

MAY|JUN 2018 ONLINE SEARCHER 21

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Figure 2: Cabells has averaged Altmetric reportedarticle mentions to the journal level.

THREE UNIQUE INDICATORSThree unique indicators developed by Cabells are also report-

ed when available; these indicators are related to position of thejournal in Cabells disciplines. These are fully displayed in theMetrics tab on the journal card. The first, Cabells ClassificationIndex (CCI), is a normalized ranking within Cabells subject cat-egories, calculated on Scopus impact factors from the most re-cent 3 years. (See Figure 2 above.) For the journal Health Af-fairs, for example, the journal's significance is very high for thesubject of Nursing, with 98% influence, meaning only 2% ofjournals in the Nursing category in Cabells have a greater im-pact. Health Affairs also has a very high level of influence in thecategory of Health Administration, in the 97% ranking, meaningonly 3% of Health Administration journals had greater influ-ence. The CCI is calculated only when a Scopus impact factor isavailable, and Scopus is selective in what journals it covers. LikeJCR, not all scholarly journals meet inclusion criteria. All jour-nals included on the Whitelist are high quality, but CCI and im-pact factors from JCR are additional quality indicators.

Cabells developed a second metric, called Difficulty of Ac-ceptance, that it claims is based on evidence of acceptancerather than self-reported acceptance rates. This figure is calcu-lated using an objective measurement, called the InstitutionalPublishing Activity Measurement. It uses the institutional affil-iation of authors and measures how frequently manuscripts areaccepted from certain highly productive institutions, with thetheory that journals that tend to publish articles from high-performing institutions (high publication rates) also tend to bemore difficult to publish in. for Health Affairs, the Difficulty ofAcceptance is 22% in each of the categories of Nursing andHealth Administration, indicating it's harder to be published in78% of the journals in those categories.

The third indicator developed by Cabells is based on the me-dian frequency of mention of articles from a particular journal

in social media as reported by Altmetric (almetric.com). Calledthe Altmetric Report, this figure shows the expected numberof mentions of articles from this journal in social media, suchas Facebook and Twitter, based on evidence from past men-tions. (See Figure 3 on page 23.) For Health Affairs, an article islikely to be mentioned 26 times. Altmetric reports article levelmetrics, but Cabells has averaged these mentions to the jour-nal level.

All of these indicators—and more—can be set as search fil-ters under Advanced Search for Cabells Whitelist journals.Journals can be searched by keywords or title, or by Cabellsdisciplinary areas. Currently, the Cabells disciplines are notkeyword-searchable, so the researcher has to scroll down thelist and highlight the desired disciplinary areas.

THE BLACKLIST

Following the January 2017 demise of Jeffrey Beall's ScholarlyOpen Access blog (often referred to as Beall's List of PredatoryPublishers or just Beall's List), Cabells Blacklist was born. Ca-bell's developed indicators for deceptive, fraudulent, and preda-tory practices. (See Figure 4 on page 23.) Where Beall was con-cerned with both publishers and journals, Cabells focuses onthe practices of individual journals. The Blacklist, which cur-rently lists 8,200 journals, is based on some 60 "behavior indi-cators" (cabells.com/blacklist-criteria) related to Integrity (Isthe journal truthful? Is the information real?), Peer Review (Isthe editorial board real or fake? Are there policies for peer re-view?), Website (Do the links work? Is the spelling and grammarcorrect?), Publication Practices (Are there false claims aboutindexing or fast turnaround time?), Metrics (Do they reportuntrue impact factors?), Fees, Access and Copyright, and Busi-ness Practices (Do they send predatory emails?).

The Blacklist is a different animal than Beall's List, but jour-nals on Beall's List are in the process of being reviewed. The

22 onlinesearcher.net

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: Cabe/fe Blacklist Journal Card gives indicatorsfor deceptive, fraudulent, and predatory practices.

Blacklist Advanced Search options are limited to keyword,publisher, country of origin, and ISSN. The journal informa-tion in the Blacklist is minimal at this time; only the title, pub-lisher, country of origin, ISSN number, and violations of Ca-bells criteria are noted. Some disciplinary areas were notedthat do not seem to be limited to Cabells disciplines. For exam-ple, upon searching the keyword n u r s i n g, several journalsthat are retrieved have Medicine listed as the discipline, eventhough Medicine is not a Cabells topic area.

Unlike Beall's List, Cabells requires a subscription. Its sub-scription fees are quoted on a sliding scale based on institution-al factors such as account size, complexity, and usage. There isno individual subscription plan.

USABILITYThe information on Cabells' website is difficult to navigate at

times, largely due to the constant need to scroll and to openpop-up windows for more information. The Blacklist reviewcriteria are prominently linked on the description page of theBlacklist. Links to Whitelist criteria are buried on the FAQ page.There is limited information on exactly how Cabells analyticsare calculated, although this is understandable from an intel-lectual property viewpoint. But it would be helpful to havetime frames for the age of the citations and social media men-tions. Are they all-time or last 5 years? Transparency seems tobe a good option.

Oddly, some of the information on Cabells metrics is out ofdate or inaccurate. At the bottom of Cabells' webpage is a linkto cabells.com/metrics and the IPA metric (Institutional Pub-lishing Activity) is explained along with Cabells CCI and Diffi-culty of Acceptance. The IPA is a measure of each university'sinfluence in scholarly communications, but the IPA for insti-tutions is nowhere to be found. The instructions for search-ing IPA do not reflect what is on the webpage.

Cabells offers customized training via webinars for sub-scribers. Look at the 2017 webinar on the Blacklist and Wh-itelist archived on BrightTALK for a more complete overviewof Cabells features (brighttalk.com/channel/15775/cabells).Also, subscriptions to the Cabells newsletter The Source canbe entered on the homepage. No archives of past issues seemto be available.

SUMMARYDespite a few irksome issues, Cabells Scholarly Analytics is

a valuable resource for directory information and quality indi-cators, providing academic writers and tenure committeeswith an authoritative list of high-quality academic journals in18 disciplines, along with information on predatory journalsand publishing scams. Cabells Scholarly Analytics is a cost-effective solution for any campus. Comparable research toolsincluded in other products such as Web of Science (publishedby Thomson Reuters) and Elsevier's Scopus are known to havepricing models that are out of reach for many institutions.

A partnership with Editage offers authors a full suite of dis-counted editorial services to help get manuscripts published inhigh-quality journals, extending author services that may (ormay not) be available locally. Cabells will work with institutionsto customize a subscription based on local needs. Though thedisciplinary coverage may not be relevant to health sciencesuniversities or those in which humanities are emphasized, Ca-bells Scholarly Analytics is highly recommended for consider-ation for contributing to scholarly communications and re-search activities at any college or university.

PaulBlobaum (pblobaum@govst.edu, pblobaum@gmail.com) is scholarlycommunications librarian, Governors State University Library.

Comments?Email the editor-in-chief (marydee@xmission.com).

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