Eigenfactor Journal Ranking Web Site

[Dennis Dillon <dillon@mail.utexas.edu>]

...Publicized with permission from site developer, Carl 
Bergstrom.

Eigenfactor http://www.eigenfactor.org ranks journals much as 
Google ranks websites.

Scholarly references join journals together in a vast network of 
citations. Eigenfactor uses the structure of the entire network 
to evaluate the importance of each journal.

The website provides influence rankings for 7000+ science and 
social science journals and rankings for an additional 110,000+ 
reference items including newspapers, and popular magazines.

"Borrowing methods from network theory, eigenfactor.org ranks the 
influence of journals much as Google's PageRank algorithm ranks 
the influence of web pages [2]. By this approach, journals are 
considered to be influential if they are cited often by other 
influential journals. Iterative ranking schemes of this type, 
known as eigenvector centrality methods [3], are notoriously 
sensitive to "dangling nodes" and "dangling clusters": nodes or 
groups of nodes which link seldom if at all to other parts of the 
network. Eigenfactor modifies the basic eigenvector centrality 
algorithm to overcome these problems and to better handle certain 
peculiarities of journal citation data."

"Different disciplines have different standards for citation and 
different time scales on which citations occur. The average 
article in a leading cell biology journal might receive 10-30 
citations within two years; the average article in leading 
mathematics journal would do very well to receive 2 citations 
over the same period. By using the whole citation network, 
Eigenfactor automatically accounts for these differences and 
allows better comparison across research areas."

"Eigenfactor.org is a non-commercial academic research project 
sponsored by the Bergstrom lab in the Department of Biology at 
the University of Washington. We aim to develop novel methods for 
evaluating the influence of scholarly periodicals and for mapping 
the structure of academic research. We are committed to sharing 
our findings with interested members of the public, including 
librarians, journal editors, publishers, and authors of scholarly 
articles."

The Eigenfactor Web site http://www.eigenfactor.org is still 
under development.


-- Dennis Dillon
Associate Director for Research Services
University of Texas Libraries, University of Texas at Austin
P.O. Box P
Austin, Texas  78713-8916      512/495-4269     FAX: 512/495-4347