A team of researchers from Northwestern University has reportedly developed a mathematical method to rank scientific journals according to their quality. This approach is projected to help scientists locate high-impact research papers to read and to cite in their own papers.
The team analysed the citation data of nearly 23 million papers that appeared in 2,267 journals representing 200 academic fields and that spanned the years 1955- 2006. Their analysis produced 200 separate tables of journal rankings by field. The results, including all the rankings, is published online in PLoS ONE, an international, peer-reviewed, open access, online journal published by the Public Library of Science.
The study was led by Luís A. Nunes Amaral, associate professor of chemical and biological engineering in Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science. Amaral and his team developed methods to look at the enormous amount of published papers and to make sense of them. For each of the 2,267 journals, they charted the citations each paper received across a certain span of years and then developed a model of that data, which allowed the researchers to compare journals. The researchers' model produced bell curves for the distribution of "quality" of the papers published in each journal. For each field, all the bell curves for the journals then were compared, which resulted in the journal rankings.
The researchers found that the time scale for a published paper's complete accumulation of citations -- a gauge for determining the full impact of the paper - can range from less than one year to 26 years, depending on the journal. Using their new method, the researchers can estimate the total number of citations a paper will get in the future and thus determine - right now - the paper's likely impact in its field. This is the kind of information university administrators and funding agencies should find helpful when they are evaluating faculty members for tenure and researchers for grant awards.
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