Mike the Mad Biologist

Impact Factors and eigenFACTOR.org (Redux)

Posted by Mike on June 19, 2008
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ScienceBlogling Bora, in discussing the new release of journal impact factors–an estimation of how widely read journal articles are–writes:

One day, hopefully very soon, this will not be news. What I mean by it is that there soon will be better metrics – ways to evaluate individual articles and individual people in way that is transparent and useful and, hopefully, helps treat the “CNS Disease”.

There is a better metric than the impact factor: the eigenfactor.

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Comments

  1. #1 James F
    June 19, 2008

    I’m on board with everything except cross-referencing to the social sciences. I would guess that it is responsible for this outcome:

    Nature: EF 1.9917, AI 17.563
    Science: EF 1.905, AI 18.287
    Cell: EF 0.65975, AI 17.037
    PNAS: EF 1.8301, 5.1534

    I like PNAS, but its EF seems overly high. Nothing is perfect, of course, but this worries me.