Are Scholarly Journals in Search for Top Quality Articles or Authors in Search for High Quality Journals?

The end of the industrial era began from the middle of the twentieth century and the world has entered a new era of information and communication. The rapid developments in science and technology were the driving force of this transformation. In the 21st century, the need for qualitative and quantitative changes in access to information and knowledge resources is quite evident. Without a doubt, one of the most important resources for quick and easy access to updated research and scientific contents for researchers and scientists is academic journals. These journals contribute to the quantitative and qualitative development and evolution of research and they are very important tools for solving underlying problems in the field of sciences and community and also the transfer of knowledge between scientists and the community. The development of universities, institutes and research centers led to increased scientific findings and subsequently the increase in the number and diversity of academic journals. Currently, scientific journals are highly specialized in various topics. In each topic, over tens to hundreds of specialty and subspecialty journals are published. Therefore, the need for ranking and separating high-quality journals from poor-quality journals is quite evident and necessary. Although the content of human scientific findings is growing with incredible speed, the issue of concern is accelerating the publication of academic journals on the scientific contents and findings of researchers. According to data published in Scientometrics journal (2010), growth rate of publication of scholarly journals is more than 5.6% per year; therefore, the number of journals was doubled in the period of 10-15 years. The growth was in such a way that the number of scholarly journals in the year 1950 was estimated about 60,000 and according to above growth rate, 50 years later in 2000, it reached to about 1,000,000 (1). Recently, the number is estimated to be 2,000,000 with reference to the double increase during the previous10-15 years. However, it seems that this estimation of growth rate and total numbers is not a correct calculation and far from reality. On the other hand, the STM report about the occasion on celebrating the 350th anniversary of scientific and scholarly journals has revealed that the number of active scholarly peer-reviewed journals was 28100 in Eng-lish language and 6450 in other languages in 2014 (2). In addition, the research of Arif Jinha at Ottawa University declared that the number of scholarly articles passed 50 million in …