Journal Status

TL;DR

This paper distinguishes between popularity and prestige in social and scholarly contexts, proposing a weighted PageRank method to measure prestige and combining it with citation metrics for a comprehensive journal status assessment.

Contribution

It introduces a weighted PageRank approach to quantify prestige and combines it with citation counts to better reflect journal status.

Findings

Weighted PageRank correlates with but differs from ISI Impact Factor.

The combined Y-factor aligns well with perceived journal status.

Significant overlap and differences found between popularity and prestige metrics.

Abstract

The status of an actor in a social context is commonly defined in terms of two factors: the total number of endorsements the actor receives from other actors and the prestige of the endorsing actors. These two factors indicate the distinction between popularity and expert appreciation of the actor, respectively. We refer to the former as popularity and to the latter as prestige. These notions of popularity and prestige also apply to the domain of scholarly assessment. The ISI Impact Factor (ISI IF) is defined as the mean number of citations a journal receives over a 2 year period. By merely counting the amount of citations and disregarding the prestige of the citing journals, the ISI IF is a metric of popularity, not of prestige. We demonstrate how a weighted version of the popular PageRank algorithm can be used to obtain a metric that reflects prestige. We contrast the rankings of journals according to their ISI IF and their weighted PageRank, and we provide an analysis that reveals both significant overlaps and differences. Furthermore, we introduce the Y-factor which is a simple combination of both the ISI IF and the weighted PageRank, and find that the resulting journal rankings correspond well to a general understanding of journal status.