• Journal of the Korean Society for information Management
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.85-104
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• 2001

The purpose of the study is to investigate the international standings of Korean medical journals and to provide a concrete journal evaluation data. The SciSearch database was searched for the 7,779 papers published in 8 Korean medical journals between 1989 and 1998. The frequency of citation to each journal was measured for each year, and the journal impact factor was calculated from 1991 to 1999 exactly as it is calculated in the Jour~~lnl Citation Reports (JCR). The Korean-language journals were rarely cited in SCI, even though the journals were of the medical areas where Korean researchers published a great deal of SCI papers. The number of citations to English-language journals started to grow from 1994 and increased rapidly from 1997. The citation interval is getting shorter, resulting in the drastic increases in the impact factors in the recent years. The nine-year averages of impact factors of the journals were distributed between 0.002 and 0.126. The international standings of Korean medical journals are very poor. When the impact factors were compared to those of SCI journals in the same subject category, Korean-language journals fell below the last SCI journals ranked by the impact factor, and the English-language journals were at the bottom among the SCI journals. The impact factors of 3 English-language Korean medical journals were about 2.0 when they became SCI journals in the late 1990s.