Tuesday, July 8, 2008

EigenfactorTM ranks journals of scientific knowledge

What Company Is Offering:
EigenfactorTM 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 (instead of purely local citation information) to evaluate the importance of each journal.
EigenfactorTM measures journal price as well as citation influence.

How It Works:
Eigenfactor provides information about price and value for thousands of scholarly periodicals. While the Eigenfactor and Article Influence scores do not incorporate price information directly, the Cost-Effectiveness Search orders journals by a measure of the value per dollar that they provide.

EigenfactorTM contains 115,000 reference items.

Eigenfactor not only ranks scholarly journals in the natural and social sciences, but also lists newsprint, PhD theses, popular magazines and more. In so doing, it more fairly values those journals bridging the gap between the social and natural sciences.
EigenfactorTM adjusts for citation differences across disciplines.

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.

More at:http://www.eigenfactor.org/

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