Abstract

Electronic publications, including e-journals, show a rapid expansion due to its several advantages for the academic and research community. The purpose of this study is to analyze the impact of e-journals on scholarly communication. The impact factors and immediacy indices were provided via JCR social science edition have been used to conduct a series of analysis on three subject fields, economics, law and psychology. The data from the last eight years show that the impact factors of e-journals have not changed, but immediacy indices have intensely increased in recent two years. Significant increase of immediacy indices is probably due to prevalence of e-journals or electronic sources of articles. The result reveals that e-journals play an important role in speeding up the scholarly communication. It is expected that the findings of this study can contribute to more efficient management of the digital libraries.