An approach to measure the impact of scientific regional journals: The latindex case

This work propose a way to measure the impact of Latin American journals by merging information from Scopus, Google Scholar Metrics and Latindex. The proposed approach is an indicator of how the papers included in regional journals are impacting the scientific community. The proposed approach can be used to classify the journals indexed in the Latindex database, generating an arrangement of their impact on the journals in the Latin American region. A set of 506 journals was selected and a detailed analysis was performed based on the data distribution when it is plotted the variable h_scopus versus the h(5) (Google Scholar Metrics). As result, we have obtained two relationship (linear and potential) between the h(5) and the h_scopus average (h_scopus_av). This result provides a valuable information through a simple tool, which can be used to estimate the possible h_scopus average value for a jounal with only a h(5) value.