The relation between Eigenfactor, audience factor, and influence weight

TL;DR

This paper analyzes three bibliometric indicators—Eigenfactor, audience factor, and influence weight—showing how they relate and differ in measuring journal performance through theoretical and empirical methods.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the audience factor and influence weight are special cases of the Eigenfactor and characterizes all three by two key properties.

Findings

The indicators can be viewed as special cases of Eigenfactor.

All three indicators share two key properties.

Differences between indicators are substantial in empirical data.

Abstract

We present a theoretical and empirical analysis of a number of bibliometric indicators of journal performance. We focus on three indicators in particular, namely the Eigenfactor indicator, the audience factor, and the influence weight indicator. Our main finding is that the last two indicators can be regarded as a kind of special cases of the first indicator. We also find that the three indicators can be nicely characterized in terms of two properties. We refer to these properties as the property of insensitivity to field differences and the property of insensitivity to insignificant journals. The empirical results that we present illustrate our theoretical findings. We also show empirically that the differences between various indicators of journal performance are quite substantial.