ISSUES IN SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION

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March 26, 2007

New Journal Ranking Site: Eigenfactor

Eigenfactor ranks journals much as Google ranks websites. It is somewhat similar to Thomson Scientific's (ISI) Journal Citation Index (JCI), though it's dataset is larger.

Some points to note:
* JCI only looks at the 8000 or so journals indexed by Thomson Scientific while potentially any journal could be included in Eigenfactor.
* The JCI is calculated based on the most recent 2-year's worth of citation data; Eigenfactor is based on the most recent 5 years.
* In collaboration with journalprices.com, Eigenfactor provides information about price and value for thousands of scholarly periodicals.
* Article Influence (AI): a measure of a journal's prestige based on per article citations and comparable to Impact Factor. Eigenfactor (EF): A measure of the overall value provided by all of the articles published in a given journal in a year.
* The Eigenfactor Web site also presents the ISI Impact Factors, so it's possible to compare the
ISI's "Impact Factors" with Eigenfactor's "Article Influence"
* Both simple and advanced searching is available: "You can search by partial or full journal name, ISSN number, or you can view a selected ISI category, only ISI-listed journals, only non-ISI-listed journals or both listed and unlisted."
* Eigenfactor is Free!

From the Eigenfactor Web site:

Eigenfactor provides influence rankings for 7000+ science and social science journals and rankings for an additional 110,000+ reference items including newspapers, and popular magazines.

Borrowing methods from network theory, eigenfactor.org ranks the influence of journals much as Google's PageRank algorithm ranks the influence of web pages. By this approach, journals are considered to be influential if they are cited often by other influential journals. Iterative ranking schemes of this type, known as eigenvector centrality methods, are notoriously sensitive to "dangling nodes" and "dangling clusters" -- nodes or groups of nodes which link seldom if at all to other parts of the network. Eigenfactor modifies the basic eigenvector centrality algorithm to overcome these problems and to better handle certain peculiarities of journal citation data.

Different disciplines have different standards for citation and different time scales on which citations occur. The average article in a leading cell biology journal might receive 10-30 citations within two years; the average article in leading mathematics journal would do very well to receive 2 citations over the same period. By using the whole citation network, Eigenfactor automatically accounts for these differences and allows better comparison across research areas.

Eigenfactor.org is a non-commercial academic research project sponsored by the Bergstrom lab in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington. We aim to develop novel methods for evaluating the influence of scholarly periodicals and for mapping the structure of academic research. We are committed to sharing our findings with interested members of the public, including librarians, journal editors, publishers, and authors of scholarly articles.

The Eigenfactor Web site http://www.eigenfactor.org is still under development.

...Publicized with permission from site developer, Carl Bergstrom.

Posted by Katie Newman at March 26, 2007 4:02 PM