Why Impact Factor is obsolete...

"Journal Status"
Authors: Johan Bollen, Marko A. Rodriguez, Herbert Van de Sompel
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.

Full paper at arxiv.org/abs/cs/0601030

Comments

JJ Merelo said…
We seem to be interested by the same things...
12:30 PM
Osame Kinouchi said…
Carlos,

You may be interested inthis post:
http://comciencias.blogspot.com/2006/03/tem-d-de-mim-cnpq.html

Regards,
8:02 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Past, Present and Future of Cybernetics and Systems Research

Summary of "The Past, Present and Future of Cybernetics and Systems Research" Symposium M at  European Meetings on Cybernetics and Systems Research (EMCSR), Vienna, Austria, April 12, 2012. Organizer: Carlos Gershenson This guided reflection on the challenges and opportunities of cybernetics and systems research (CSR) included initial interventions by panelists Peter Erdi, Helena Knyazeva, Stefan Thurner, Peter Csermely, and Alexander Lazlo. Afterwards, the floor was opened to interventions from the general public and further interventions by panelists. Commentaries were made from a broad variety of perspectives, but several general ideas can be distilled from the discussion. CSR have strongly influenced all scientific disciplines. As an example, the term "system" is used commonly in daily language. One of the breakthroughs of CSR lies in the search of commonalities across disciplines. Even when this was achieved to a certain degree, there is still a lack of
Read more

New Book: Complexity: 5 Questions

Image
This volume consists of short, interview-style contributions by leading figures in the field of complexity, based on five questions. The answers trace their personal experience and expose their views on the definition, aspects, problems and future of complexity. The aim of the book is to bring together the opinions of researchers with different backgrounds on the emerging study of complex systems. In this way, we will see similarities and differences, agreements and debates among the approaches of different schools. Contributors: Peter M. Allen, Philip W. Anderson, W. Brian Arthur, Yaneer Bar-Yam, Eric Bonabeau, Paul Cilliers, Jim Crutchfield, Bruce Edmonds, Nigel Gilbert, Hermann Haken, Francis Heylighen, Bernardo A. Huberman, Stuart A. Kauffman, Seth Lloyd, Gottfried Mayer-Kress, Melanie Mitchell, Edgar Morin, Mark Newman, Grégoire Nicolis, Jordan B. Pollack, Peter Schuster, Ricard V. Solé, Tamás Vicsek, Stephen Wolfram. Get it at Amazon.com Check out more books from the 5 Questions s
Read more

Sites that revolutionized the Web

I compiled a list of the websites that have changed the way information is produced, handled, or distributed over the Internet. Many of these sites have something in common: they enable users (human or software) to judge the relevance of their content, to provide "interesting" information to others. This has been called distributed cognition or collective intelligence: like diligent ants, the small contributions of many people or sites lead to great achievements and sources of information. Google . The most effective search engine for several years now. It judges the relevance of a webpage (its PageRank) by the PageRank of webpages that link to it. Thus, if many webpages link to a certain site, this should be interesting. And even more if those webpages are interesting themselves. Google has become an empire of free web-based utilities (in some cases buying other companies): GMail . One of the most flexible free web-based mail providers , it gives users almost 3Gb of disk sp
Read more