Effectiveness of journal ranking schemes as a tool for locating information
Stringer MJ, Sales-Pardo M, Amaral LANPLoS ONE 3(2), e1683 (2008)
Times cited: 58
Abstract
Background
The rise of electronic publishing, preprint archives, blogs, and wikis
is raising concerns among publishers, editors, and scientists about the
present day relevance of academic journals and traditional peer review.
These concerns are especially fuelled by the ability of search engines
to automatically identify and sort information. It appears that academic
journals can only remain relevant if acceptance of research for
publication within a journal allows readers to infer immediate, reliable
information on the value of that research.\
Methodology/Principal Findings
Here, we systematically evaluate the effectiveness of journals, through
the work of editors and reviewers, at evaluating unpublished research.
We find that the distribution of the number of citations to a paper
published in a given journal in a specific year converges to a steady
state after a journal-specific transient time, and demonstrate that in
the steady state the logarithm of the number of citations has a
journal-specific typical value. We then develop a model for the
asymptotic number of citations accrued by papers published in a journal
that closely matches the data.\
Conclusions/Significance
Our model enables us to quantify both the typical impact and the range
of impacts of papers published in a journal. Finally, we propose a
journal-ranking scheme that maximizes the efficiency of locating high
impact research.