Eigenfactor™ Journal Ranking
The Eigenfactor™ project was launched in January 2007 to provide the scientific community with "a better method of evaluating the influence of scholarly journals." The Journal Ranking tool provides a web interface through which researchers, librarians, and other interested parties can rank journals by field and track changes in influence over time.
Eigenfactor analyzes five factors—citations, articles, sources, prices and usage. See the Basic, Advanced, and Cost Effectiveness searches:
- Ranks journals by using the structure of the entire network, rather than local citation information, to evaluate the importance of each journal. Provides "a rough estimate of how often a journal will be used by scholars."
- Article Influence measures the average influence of articles appearing in the same journal.
- The Cost-Effectiveness Search combines journal price variables with citation influence to measure of the value of the dollar per journal. This is very interesting, but caution is necessary when interpreting it on a local level.
- In addition to rankings of scholarly journals, measures the influence of other works on scholarly literature—e.g., which newspapers, theses, popular magazines, etc. are most often cited.
- Calculations are based on the citations received over a five-year period.
