Journal status

Abstract

The status of an actor in a social context is commonly defined in terms of two factors: the total number of endorsements the actor receives from other actors and the prestige of the endorsing actors. These two factors indicate the distinction between popularity and expert appreciation of the actor, respectively. We refer to the former as popularity and to the latter as prestige. These notions of popularity and prestige also apply to the domain of scholarly assessment. The ISI Impact Factor (ISI IF) is defined as the mean number of citations a journal receives over a 2 year period. By merely counting the amount of citations and disregarding the prestige of the citing journals, the ISI IF is a metric of popularity, not of prestige. We demonstrate how a weighted version of the popular PageRank algorithm can be used to obtain a metric that reflects prestige. We contrast the rankings of journals according to their ISI IF and their Weighted PageRank, and we provide an analysis that reveals both significant overlaps and differences. Furthermore, we introduce the Y-factor which is a simple combination of both the ISI IF and the weighted PageRank, and find that the resulting journal rankings correspond well to a general understanding of journal status.

Comparing two “thermometers”: Impact factors of 20 leading economic journals according to Journal Citation Reports and Scopus

“…We may perhaps suppose that in bibliometrics the importance of weighted measures described, for example, by PINSKY et. al (1976) and tested by BOLLEN et al (2006) will increase as citation databases will cover more and more source publications.…”

Ten good reasons to use the Eigenfactor™ metrics

“…Despite the statistically significant correlation between the journal rankings provided by the Impact Factor and the Eigenfactor metrics -Franceschet (2010b) measured a Spearman correlation coefficient of 0.77 with respect to the Eigenfactor score and of 0.84 with respect to the Article Influence scorea close analysis reveals that the journal compilations according to the three metrics contain more than a few marked discrepancies (Bollen et al, 2006;Franceschet, 2010a;West et al, 2009). In the latest (2008) edition of Science JCR, the Eigenfactor compilation is dominated by Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of USA, and Science.…”

“…By contrast, the Impact Factor simply counts citations without weighting them. As a result, the Impact Factor has been classified as a bibliometric measure of popularity, while the Eigenfactor score captures the bibliometric notions of prestige and trustworthiness (Bollen et al, 2006;Franceschet, 2010a). A journal that is endorsed by prestigious and trustworthy sources is more likely to be prestigious and trustworthy.…”

“…Journal PageRank is a journal ranking technique proposed by Bollen et al (2006) with two minor differences with respect to the Eigenfactor metric: journal PageRank includes journal self-citations, while the Eigenfactor metric does not. Moreover, in the journal PageRank approach teleporting transitions are uniformly distributed over all journals, while in the Eigenfactor metric the weight of each teleporting transition is proportional to the number of article published by the target journal.…”

Identification of Core Journals and Analysis of Collaboration Networks Among Researchers in Ibero America

“…In particular, we have calculated the PageRank (Brin & Page, 1998) which is an indicator that shows the relative importance of a particular node, and one that has been widely popularised by the search engine Google. Although originally the PageRank algorithm was first used as a metric for evaluating webpages, its ideas have influenced other areas such as citation analysis (Ma, Guan, & Zhao, 2008) and journal evaluation (Bollen, Rodriguez, & Van de Sompel, 2006). In this study, we propose the value given by PageRank as a form to evaluate the relative importance of a country in terms of collaborations in the network.…”