Eigenfactor: Measuring the value and prestige of scholarly journals

Abstract

Our approach is to rank journals much as Google ranks Web pages. While Google uses the network of hyperlinks on the Web, we use citations in the academic literature as tallied by JCR." (Journal Citation Reports). at http://www.eigenfactor.org. By this approach, we aim to identity the most influential journals, where a journal is considered to be influential if it is cited often by other influential journals. While this might sound hopelessly circular, it is not: we can iteratively calculate the importance of each journal in the citation network by a simple mathematical algorithm. ... This iterative ranking scheme, which we call Eigenfactor, accounts for the fact that a single citation from a high-quality journal may be more valuable than multiple citations from peripheral publications. We measure the importance of a citation by the influence of the citing journal divided by the total number of citations appearing in that journal. This corrects for differences across disciplines and journals in the propensity to cite other papers. For example, a citation from a review article that has cursory references to large numbers of papers counts for less than a citation from a research article that cites only papers that are essentially related to its own argument.