The choice to focus on a journal's impact factor, or its quartile, in authoritative rankings, when deciding where to publish research results can be driven by various reasons. These may include personal prestige, enhancing the appeal of a CV, the desire to increase publication-related rewards, meeting the conditions of scientific funds, or fulfilling qualification requirements. While these considerations deviate from the “pure science” perspective, the fact is that they are widely adopted. Our research demonstrates that the conventional division into journal quartiles may privilege certain disciplinary categories while disadvantaging others. Disciplinary categories in Journal Citation Reports (JCR) and similar rankings are imbalanced in terms of the number of articles across different journal quartiles. This is attributable to three factors: the distribution of journals across quartiles, the varying volume of journals, and the selection of the highest quartile when journals are categorized under multiple disciplines. Narrower research areas, such as Topic Clusters from SciVal, may completely lack Q1 journals dedicated to them, or even any such journals at all. This finding might also interest publishers when selecting topics for launching new titles. The apparent inequality between disciplines unveiled in our study offers a new perspective to argue against the use of quartile metrics, at least in a straightforward manner, when evaluating performance and shaping science policies.

中文翻译：

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“我想在第一季度发表，但找不到第一季度”：跨学科类别和主题的期刊四分位数分布研究

在决定在哪里发表研究成果时，可能会出于多种原因而选择关注期刊的影响因子或其在权威排名中的四分位数。这些可能包括个人声望、增强简历的吸引力、增加与出版相关的奖励的愿望、满足科学基金的条件或满足资格要求。虽然这些考虑偏离了“纯科学”的角度，但事实是它们被广泛采用。我们的研究表明，传统的期刊四分位数划分可能会优先考虑某些学科类别，而对其他学科类别不利。期刊引文报告 (JCR) 和类似排名中的学科类别在不同期刊四分位的文章数量方面不平衡。这归因于三个因素：期刊在四分位数之间的分布、期刊数量的变化以及期刊被分类在多个学科下时选择最高四分位数。较窄的研究领域，例如 SciVal 的主题集群，可能完全缺乏专门针对它们的 Q1 期刊，甚至根本没有任何此类期刊。在选择发布新游戏的主题时，这一发现也可能会让出版商感兴趣。我们的研究中揭示的学科之间明显的不平等提供了一个新的视角来反对在评估绩效和制定科学政策时至少以直接的方式反对使用四分位指标。