The Practice of Non-patent References (NPR) Analysis to Evaluate the Impact of Academic Journals

Journal rankings and journal ratings are important to government, research institutes and scientific research, which use as the criteria for evaluating researcher's performance to determine whether he or she can get a promotion or research funds. The only widely adopted journal assessment method is impact factor, focusing on the citations between academic journals. However, impact factor disregards the practical applications of academic journals. In this article, we propose a method to rank academic journals, considering non-patent reference (NPR) in the patent document. The differences of journal ranking from impact factor and NPR are compared in different fields. The results of this study provide a new perspective to assess the practical value of academic journals, especially in those technological and scientific fields. This study considered science and technology linkages and the needs of journal assessment stakeholders, which sheds light on journal assessment and journal ranking methods.