Babson Library Information Literacy Blog

Hi everyone! I’m Chris, the new Information Literacy Coordinator, and I’ll be keeping this site up to date from now on. Promise!

I wanted to share a couple of interesting things I ran across today. I’m doing a little research for a presentation on open access scholarly journals, and I kept running across references to different ways to measure how useful a particular journal actually is.

The best known way to do this seems to be by using ISI’s Journal Citation Report Impact Factors, which measure how often an “average article” in a journal has been cited during the year following its publication, among other things (there’s an interesting explanation by a chemist about how they work here). This has some problems, most notably that a lot of articles don’t get cited until more than a year has passed since their publication.

A free tool that’s trying to remedy some of those problems is EigenFactor, which has a much more complicated way of scoring how valuable a journal is. I don’t pretend to understand it: there’s a lot of math. But some of the basic ideas, such as scoring a journal over five years instead of one, and taking into account the relative weight of each citation, seem to make sense.

The site is worth poking around in, although there are some flaws. The categorization seems a bit strange at times (physical therapy and occupational therapy have no categories, for example, and are lumped in with other disciplines), and the EigenFactors themselves are hard to fathom as pure numbers. Is 0.78 good? It’s hard to tell. But the ranking mechanism is at least somewhat useful, and the information one can obtain by clicking on a particular journal title is interesting.

Bottom line: it’s not always easy to tell whether the journal you’re purchasing or publishing in is “good” or “respected” (whatever that means). But it’s fascinating to see which journals tend to rise to the top of the heap.

Oh, and open access journals, despite differences in publishing format, are seeing comparable impact factors to their non-open access counterparts. I find that the most interesting thing of all.