The most influential journals: Impact Factor and Eigenfactor

Abstract

Progressin science is driven by the publication of novel ideas and experiments, most usually in peer-reviewed journals, but nowadays increasingly just on the internet. We all have our own ideas of which are the most influential journals, but is there a simple statistical metric of the influence of a journal? Most scientists would immediately say Impact Factor (IF), which is published online in Journal Citation Reports® as part of the ISI Web of Knowledgesm (www.thomsonreuters.com/products_services/scientific/Journal_Citation_Reports). The IF is the average number of citations in a year given to those papers in a journal published in the previous 2 years. But what, for example, is the most influential of the 3 following journals: A, which publishes just 1 paper a year and has a stellar IF of 100; B, which published 1,000,000 papers per year and has a dismal IF of 0.1 but 100,000 citations; or C, which publishes 5,000 papers a year with an IF of 10? Unless there is a very odd distribution of citations in B, or A has a paradigm-shifting paper like the …