• Journal of Information Management
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• v.36 no.3
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• pp.183-193
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• 2005

Korean Academy of Medical Sciences began developing Korean Medical Citaton Index(KoMCI) database in 2002, and has announced the impact factors of Korean medical journals published since 2000. In July 2005, Korea Research Foundation also announced the KCI impact factor of journals covering all subject areas for the 2003 and 2004. We compared the impact factor(IF), impact factor excluding self-citation(ZIF), and self-citation impact factor(SIF) of KoMCI 2004 and KCI 2004 in order to disclose why there is such a great difference in the values of impact factors between two databases. Out of 72 medical journals in both database, 59 journals were compared after excluding the missing data in KCI. Mean IF of KoMCI 2004 was 0.2 and that of KCI 2004 was 0.03(p=0.0000). Mean ZIF of KoMCI was 0.06 and that of KCI was 0.01(p=0.000). Mean SIF of KoMCI was 0.139 and that of KCI was 0.02(p=0.0000). We presumed that the major difference in the impact factor values was originated from the fact that KCI does not control the authority of journal names cited in the references. We strongly recommend that it is necessary to control the authority especially if Korea Research Foundation wants to ensure the validity and reliability of KCI data in the evaluation of korean journals.