Evaluating agricultural journals based on Matthew’s value

Matthew's value is an index that examines the visibility of a journal's articles over the past five years. In this study, the agricultural journals were evaluated using this index during 2010- 2016.

The statistical population of this citation analysis study consisted of 171 journals indexed in Scopus. The data were collected using the SCImago, and the Kolmogorov-Smirnov, Spearman correlation coefficient and Pearson correlation tests were applied to prove the relationship between Hirsch (h) index and Matthew’s value.

A total of 4037 Iranian articles were published in 171 studied journals. The highest rate of acceptance of agricultural articles by the journals was 237 articles, the highest h-index was 193 and the highest Matthew’s value was 12.253, which belonged to European and American journals. Correlation coefficient test confirmed the positive relationship between h-index and Matthew’s value.

Increasing scientific outputs in the field of agriculture does not necessarily lead to increased citation; therefore, both quantity and quality should be considered in scientific outputs.