Big Macs and Eigenfactor scores: Don't let correlation coefficients fool you
By Ismael Rafols, Alan L. Porter, Loet Leydesdorff. J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol., 2009
366 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The Eigenfactor Metrics provide an alternative way of evaluating scholarly journals based on an iterative ranking procedure analogous to Google's PageRank algorithm. These metrics have recently been adopted by Thomson-Reuters and are listed alongside the Impact Factor in the Journal Citation Reports. But do these metrics differ sufficiently so as to be a useful addition to the bibliometric toolbox? Davis (2008) has argued otherwise, based on his finding of a 0.95 correlation coefficient between Eigenfactor score and Total Citations for a sample of journals in the field of medicine. This conclusion is mistaken; here we illustrate the basic statistical fallacy to which Davis succumbed. We provide a complete analysis of the 2006 Journal Citation Reports and demonstrate that there are statistically and economically significant differences between the information provided by the Eigenfactor Metrics and that provided by Impact Factor and Total Citations.
Subfields: Statistics and Probability
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/10d0fec85c49040f27150576302eb4ad5f96032e
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In Statistics and Probability
- Ludo Waltman
- John C. Mingers
- Loet Leydesdorff
- Raminta Pranckute
- Chaomei Chen
- Ismael Rafols
- Judit Bar-Ilan
- Saif M. Mohammad
Citations in the corpus
- A review of theory and practice in scientometrics (2015, background): “Fersht (2009) and Davies (2008) argue empirically, that the Eigenfactor gives essentially the same information as total citations as it is size-dependent, but West et al. (2010) dispute this.”
- A review of the literature on citation impact indicators (2015, background): “The Journal Citation Reports include the eigenfactor and article influence indicators (Bergstrom, 2007; West et al., 2010a), while Scopus includes the SCImago journal rank (SJR) indicator (González-Pereira et al., 2010; Guerrero-Bote & Moya-Anegón, 2012).”