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After January's double whammie for Thomson Scientific and its coveted impact factor (here and here), my favorite journal, PLoS ONE has now published a paper which spells even more trouble for the company. The authors come up with yet a new scheme of ranking journals that yields quite different ranks than the ones according to the allmighty IF. Alla Katsnelson from TheScientist has already posted on this issue, so I'll save my time and just quote from her post:Rather than relying on an average of citations to rate a journal, the system uses a mathematical model to characterize the typical number of citations that papers in specific journals are likely to receive.
[...]
Amaral and his team looked though a database of 23 million papers published in more than 2,000 journals since 1955. The most cited paper in the pool got 200,000 citations, while half of all papers didn't get cited at all. "You have this really broad range, so the mean is a really bad measure to use," he said; if one paper in a given year receives 1000 citations, "no matter if none of the other papers have got many citations, that paper is going to change significantly the mean."
[...]
In a good ranking system, papers from higher ranked journals should have higher numbers of citations than papers from lower ranked journals most of the time -- a criterion that, according to their analysis, their system (called q) meets better than the Impact Factor, Amaral said.
[...]
Amaral and his team looked though a database of 23 million papers published in more than 2,000 journals since 1955. The most cited paper in the pool got 200,000 citations, while half of all papers didn't get cited at all. "You have this really broad range, so the mean is a really bad measure to use," he said; if one paper in a given year receives 1000 citations, "no matter if none of the other papers have got many citations, that paper is going to change significantly the mean."
[...]
In a good ranking system, papers from higher ranked journals should have higher numbers of citations than papers from lower ranked journals most of the time -- a criterion that, according to their analysis, their system (called q) meets better than the Impact Factor, Amaral said.
Now go there and chime in with the comments already!
Posted on Wednesday 05 March 2008 - 14:38:33 
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comment: 0| Thomson Scientific impact factor citation statistics citation metrics journal ranking |
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