The Robustness analysis of CAS Journal Ranking against “Covidization” of research

The covid-19 pandemic provides a natural dataset to examine the performance of evaluation indicators in terms of crisis and assess their ability to adapt to rapidly changing scientific landscapes. In this paper, we explore the robustness of CAS Journal Ranking, one of the most widely used journal ranking systems in China, in response to “Covidization” of research. The results show that evaluation indicator of CAS Journal Ranking is more robust relatively, i.e., FNCSI is robust to highly cited papers and the CWTS paper-level classification system can help to reduce the impact of covid-19 pandemic. Future research could focus on how to evaluate the public emergency-related publications classified into non-emergency categories, and analyze whether the high impact of these publications results from academic value of research itself or the pursuit of research hotspots.