http://www.pnas.org/content/106/17/6883.full
PNAS publishes a letter on the "Eigenfactor" version of citation ranking, some attempt to come up with yet another version of impact factor. The fawning conclusion? That you can "publish in PNAS with the full knowledge that you are contributing to one of the most influential drivers of scientific progress."
Also, apparently, in JBC, which way outranks Cell.
Who amongst you doesn't want to know what those tantalizing unlabeled dots near Cell and Phys Rev B are? J Nobody Reads This?
11 comments:
Sweet! With my two first-author papers in JBC, I am officially living the high life. *cracks open cold ones*
Yeah, who are those other journal's in Cell's neighborhood anyway?
On a related note, my PI called Nature a "fashion magazine" today.
*Snork*
Not to denigrate anyone's Nature's publications or anything - I'm sure they're very impressive.
But there was much grumbling in the lab recently over the publication of the glowing green monkeys. GrAdvisor was particularly irritated by that one because it didn't actually show *anything* new. Except green glowing monkeys. Apparently that's a fashion statement.
Yeah, and I have a different eigenvalue equation demonstrating that the Journal of Wood is the most impactful journal of all time. This is kind of data-massaging, no???
DGT, be happy you weren't slumming around in Cell or something like that. Straight for the gold!
AA, I feel as though now would be a good time to start raising the standards for who can use primates in research and who can't. Admittedly a bit of a "lock the barn after the horses have left" but still...
J Wood!
I bet those 3 dots are Plant Cell, Plant Phys and Plant J.
But as they are about plants people are not supposed to care...
How is it data-massaging? They're using the exact same method Google uses to calculate PageRank. There's only one free parameter, and they use the same value Google claims to use (i.e. they didn't pick a value just to make their journal look good).
In fact, Google's PageRank has its roots in citation-graph methods, so they're just bringing it full circle. Whether you believe in PageRank/"Eigenfactor" or not is a valid question (evidence suggests Google is not actually using PageRank anymore), but the method itself is sound.
Anon, kindly point out the place where I referred to this as "data massaging." It's stupid, pointless, irritating, and useless, but I didn't claim it was data massaging, nor did anyone else.
Seriously, in biomedical fields people get 10,000+ cites from a paper? How is that even possible?
SW, secretly we just email each other with offers of citation swaps. "I'll cite yours if you cite mine!"
Not surprising that PNAS and JBC. Both eigenfactor (y axis) and total citations (x axis) scale with journal size. PNAS and JBC are among the biggest journals.
I'm going to venture that those two data points are Angewandte Chemie and Chemical Reviews.
Any takers?
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