A principal component analysis of 39 scientific impact measures
arXiv:0902.2183 · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0006022
Abstract
The impact of scientific publications has traditionally been expressed in terms of citation counts. However, scientific activity has moved online over the past decade. To better capture scientific impact in the digital era, a variety of new impact measures has been proposed on the basis of social network analysis and usage log data. Here we investigate how these new measures relate to each other, and how accurately and completely they express scientific impact. We performed a principal component analysis of the rankings produced by 39 existing and proposed measures of scholarly impact that were calculated on the basis of both citation and usage log data. Our results indicate that the notion of scientific impact is a multi-dimensional construct that can not be adequately measured by any single indicator, although some measures are more suitable than others. The commonly used citation Impact Factor is not positioned at the core of this construct, but at its periphery, and should thus be used with caution.
References in corpus (4)
Cited by in corpus (35)
- Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research
- How well developed are altmetrics? A cross-disciplinary analysis of the presence of 'alternative metrics' in scientific publications
- Impact Factor: outdated artefact or stepping-stone to journal certification?
- Measuring academic influence: Not all citations are equal
- Usage Bibliometrics
- Altmetrics: New Indicators for Scientific Communication in Web 2.0
- Universality of scholarly impact metrics
- Weighted citation: An indicator of an article's prestige
- Author-level metrics in the new academic profile platforms: The online behaviour of the Bibliometrics community
- An evaluation of the Australian Research Council's journal ranking
- Impact of lexical and sentiment factors on the popularity of scientific papers
- Grand Challenges in Measuring and Characterizing Scholarly Impact
- Hierarchical networks of scientific journals
- The relationship between usage and citations in an open access mega journal
- The citation wake of publications detects Nobel laureates' papers
- Lobby index as a network centrality measure
- Measuring field-normalized impact of papers on specific societal groups: An altmetrics study based on Mendeley data
- Altmetrics (Chapter from Beyond Bibliometrics: Harnessing Multidimensional Indicators of Scholarly Impact)
- Social Media Attention Increases Article Visits: An Investigation on Article-Level Referral Data of PeerJ
- Implementation of the PaperRank and AuthorRank indices in the Scopus database
- A review of the literature on citation impact indicators
- Publication patterns of award-winning forest scientists and implications for the ERA journal ranking
- Recent advances in bibliometric indexes and the PaperRank problem
- Motif-based success scores in coauthorship networks are highly sensitive to author name disambiguation
- Dot-Science Top Level Domain: academic websites or dumpsites?
- BIP! DB: A Dataset of Impact Measures for Scientific Publications
- An empirical and theoretical critique of the Euclidean index
- The validation of (advanced) bibliometric indicators through peer assessments: A comparative study using data from InCites and F1000
- The Emerging Scholarly Brain
- Author Impact: Evaluations, Predictions, and Challenges
- Determining crucial factors for the popularity of scientific articles
- Popular and/or Prestigious? Measures of Scholarly Esteem
- Simplifying Impact Prediction for Scientific Articles
- A Semi-automated Peer-review System
- Indicators of the Interdisciplinarity of Journals: Diversity, Centrality, and Citations