Critics have shown that the Impact Factor does not compare well among disciplines, it tends to increase over time regardless of journal performance, and the methods behind its calculation are not transparent (particularly, what types of articles are counted). The ISI® Impact Factor-calculated as the average number of times the articles from a journal published within the past two years have been cited in the Journal Citation Reports year-has, to date, received the most attention and hence, the most criticism. Journal rankings and scores are, rightly or wrongly, used ubiquitously now by academic selection panels to assess applicant track records, by scholars choosing journals to which they will submit their research findings, and by publishing companies seeking to market their journals. Love them or loathe them, ‘objective’ metrics designed to measure a peer-reviewed journal’s performance relative to others are here to stay. When comparing a selection of journals within or among disciplines, we recommend collecting multiple citation-based metrics for a sample of relevant and realistic journals to calculate the composite rankings and their relative uncertainty windows. Agglomerative and divisive clustering and multi-dimensional scaling techniques applied to the Ecology + Multidisciplinary journal set identified specific clusters of similarly ranked journals, with only Nature & Science separating out from the others. Our composite index approach therefore approximates relative journal reputation, at least for that discipline. We then cross-compared the κ-resampled ranking for the Ecology + Multidisciplinary journal set to the results of a survey of 188 publishing ecologists who were asked to rank the same journals, and found a 0.68–0.84 Spearman’s ρ correlation between the two rankings datasets. We applied the approach to six sample sets of scientific journals from Ecology ( n = 100 journals), Medicine ( n = 100), Multidisciplinary ( n = 50) Ecology + Multidisciplinary ( n = 25), Obstetrics & Gynaecology ( n = 25) and Marine Biology & Fisheries ( n = 25).
To provide a simple yet more objective way to rank journals within and among disciplines, we developed a κ-resampled composite journal rank incorporating five popular citation indices: Impact Factor, Immediacy Index, Source-Normalized Impact Per Paper, SCImago Journal Rank and Google 5-year h-index this approach provides an index of relative rank uncertainty. The absolute value of any particular index is arguably meaningless unless compared to other journals, and different metrics result in divergent rankings. Regardless of their individual faults and advantages, citation-based metrics are used by researchers to maximize the citation potential of their articles, and by employers to rank academic track records.
There are now many methods available to assess the relative citation performance of peer-reviewed journals.
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