Determining Core Journals in the Scientific Productions of Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, and Their Access and Quality Status

Identifying The core journals can help libraries to identify the actual needs of users, improve the process of providing needed resources, eliminate unnecessary issues, and optimize allocation of funds. So, the purpose of this study is to identify core journals by examining the references of the scientific productions of Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences in Web of Science and Scopus (2017), and examine the status of their access and quality.

The research was citation analysis and The Bradford law of scattering was used to determine the core journals. The population of the study is citations in 3961 indexed articles of Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences in Web of Science and Scopus. The status of access to the core journals was determined using the website provided by the Ministry of Health for this purpose and to determine the quality of journals, Q index was used using Journal Citation Reports (JCR)

Out of 10155 Cited Journals in the scientific productions of Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, 104 titles were identified as core journals. Checking the status of access and quality of core journals showed that 69.2% of the journals are accessible through the Journals Subscribed by the academic consortium of the Ministry of Health and 93.3% of core journals are indexed in ISI.

Considering the provision of two-thirds of the core journals through the Scientific Resource Consortium, It seems that the practitioners of the selection and provision of journals in the Ministry of Health have been doing well.Also,  93.3% of the core journals are listed in Journal Citation Reports (JCR) and this shows that researchers at Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences use Credible journals in their compilations.