Eigenfactor

Article summary

The Eigenfactor score, developed by Jevin West and Carl Bergstrom at the University of Washington, is a rating of the total importance of a scientific journal. Journals are rated according to the number of incoming citations, with citations from highly ranked journals weighted to make a larger contribution to the eigenfactor than those from poorly ranked journals. As a measure of importance, the Eigenfactor score scales with the total impact of a journal. All else equal, journals generating higher impact to the field have larger Eigenfactor scores. Citation metrics like eigenfactor or PageRank-based scores reduce the effect of self-referential groups. Eigenfactor scores and Article Influence scores (AIS) are calculated by eigenfactor.org, where they can be freely viewed. The Eigenfactor score is intended to measure the importance of a journal to the scientific community, by considering the origin of the incoming citations, and is thought to reflect how frequently an average researcher would access content from that journal. However, the Eigenfactor score is influenced by the size of the journal, so that the score doubles when the journal doubles in size (measured as number of published articles per year). The Article Influence score measures the average influence of articles in the journal, and is therefore comparable to the traditional impact factor.…

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1. Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
2. Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
3. If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?

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