Complexity Digest 2006.03 - 01.02
16-Jan-2006
Journal Status, arXiv
Excerpts: 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 (...) 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.(...) 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.
Contributing Editor's Note: Scientific research in many cases is measured by ISI Impact Factor (how popular is the journal in which an article is published). This work adds evindence to the criticisms to the Impact Factor, in the sense that this does not always reflect the scientific quality of a journal.
- Source: Journal Status
[ http://arXiv.org/abs/cs.DL/0601030 ], Johan Bollen, Marko A. Rodriguez, Herbert Van de Sompel, DOI: cs.DL/0601030, arXiv, 2006/01/09