Unclear rationale for Poland’s low ranking of ACS Earth and Space Chemistry

Determine the rationale and decision criteria used by Poland’s Lista czasopism punktowanych to assign a low score (20 points) to the journal ACS Earth and Space Chemistry, despite its high ChatGPT-based Journal Quality Factor (JQF) of 3.16 and technically strong abstracts, in order to explain the observed discrepancy within the Earth and Planetary Sciences field.

Background

The paper introduces Journal Quality Factors (JQFs), computed as the average ChatGPT-based quality score for a journal’s articles, and compares them with national journal rankings from Finland, Norway, and Poland. While correlations are generally strong, the authors investigate outliers where JQFs diverge from national ranks.

Within Earth and Planetary Sciences, the journal ACS Earth and Space Chemistry exhibits a high JQF but a low Polish ranking (20 points). The authors note the journal’s "impressive sounding abstracts" and highlight uncertainty about the Polish list’s decision, flagging this specific discrepancy as unresolved.

References

ACS Earth and Space Chemistry has a high JQF of 3.16 (18th highest out of 100 in Earth and Planetary Sciences) but medium or low journal ranks (Finland: 1, Norway: 1, Poland: 20): This has impressive sounding abstracts and it not clear why it was low ranked by Poland (e.g., "Moderately volatile elements (MVEs) are variably depleted in planetary bodies, reflecting the imprints of nebular and planetary processes. [ ... ] To quantitatively understand why Na, K, and Rb are depleted in planetary bodies, we have carried out vacuum evaporation experiments from basaltic melt at 1200 and 1400 ℃ to study their evaporation kinetics and isotopic fractionations. [ ... ]").

— Journal Quality Factors from ChatGPT: More meaningful than Impact Factors?  (2411.09984 - Thelwall et al., 2024) in Section 3.2, Trend-breaking journals in low correlation fields