When standard network measures fail to rank journals: A theoretical and empirical analysis

TL;DR

This paper critically examines the limitations of standard network-based journal ranking methods, revealing how they can produce misleading results, and proposes a new citation path perspective to improve ranking accuracy.

Contribution

It introduces a theoretical critique of existing network models and proposes a novel citation path approach for more reliable journal rankings.

Findings

Standard network measures can create fictitious relations among journals.

The citation path perspective yields significantly different rankings.

Proposed method addresses limitations of traditional network metrics.

Abstract

Journal rankings are widely used and are often based on citation data in combination with a network perspective. We argue that some of these network-based rankings can produce misleading results. From a theoretical point of view, we show that the standard network modelling approach of citation data at the journal level (i.e., the projection of paper citations onto journals) introduces fictitious relations among journals. To overcome this problem, we propose a citation path perspective, and empirically show that rankings based on the network and the citation path perspective are very different. Based on our theoretical and empirical analysis, we highlight the limitations of standard network metrics, and propose a method to overcome these limitations and compute journal rankings.