More Journal Ranking Information

By Brandon Towl

Here’s something I found that may be of interest for “Brains”– a follow up, if you will, to Gualtiero’s post on European journal rankings.
The site I found is called journalrankings.com: www.journal-ranking.com/ranking/web/index.html

This site covers only science and science related journals, but it does have a sub-category for history and philosophy of science.  What is interesting is that they give the traditional ISI factor for all journals, plus their own home-made rankings. I won’t go into detail, but their rankings take certain citation habits into consideration.  For example, it is possible for a small technical journal to have “internal” debates between a select few authors and thus boost its citation rate by citing articles from the same journal.  Thus “within journal” citatons are given less
weight than “across journal” citations.  Details are available on the web site.  The site also gives journal impact ratings and paper impact ratings, which is interesting as well.

A few things I noticed:

The homebrew rankings seems to get things right at times when ISI does not. For example, the homebrew rankings list Psych Review as having more impact that Annual Review of Psychology, which seems right to me.
There are some suprises too: Nature Neuroscience is ranked 7th among neuroscience journals, behind Neuron, Trends in Neuroscience, and Progress in Neurobiology.  I would have thought otherwise (though this might just be exposing my own ignorance, of course).  Human Brain Mapping and Neuroimage are the top
neuroimaging journals.
And for us philosophers, ISIS actually comes out number three in the rankings for History and Philosphy of Science, while Philosophy of Science comes out as number eight.  Keep in mind that the citation rates used are from scientific journals, and so do not apply to philosophy journals generally.  Generally, though, citation rates in
the “History and Philosophy of Science” category are staggeringly low– looks like philosophers of science are having little impact on actual science.

Just something to play with– maybe someone will find it useful!

31 Comments

  1. Oops, I screwed up. Their rankings for the category ‘history and philosophy of science’ are here“>https://eigenfactor.org/results.php?fulljournalname1=&grping=%25&issnnumber=&ordering=perarticle&finecat=MQ&resultsperpage=100&Submit=Search”>here.

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