Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Two free web sites that help to evaluate journals

Yesterday I posed the question about evaluating scientific magazines to the Science Librarians listserv. The definitive answer was that the Standard Rate and Data Service (SRDS) provides circulation data for periodicals which can be used to gauge the quality of a magazine. However this is a fee based service.

Irwin Weintraub of Brooklyn College did provide these two free services that can be used to evaluate journals.

Take a look at SCImagojr .com [FREE!]. This is a project from Spain, which is analyzing journals according to usage -- the project is, I believe, supported by Elsevier. In any case, their dataset is the Scopus database! Be sure to read their ABOUT page:http://www.scimagojr.com/aboutus.php

Another free site you may want to look at is eigenfactor .org, which is using the journal database that is the foundation for Web of Science. Using Eigenfactor, you can get ranking according to either the Eigenfactor Score (a kind of google-like page rank score) or the Article Influence Score (a kind of Impact Factor) -- in both cases, the higher the score, the better! Interestingly, at the Eigenfactor site, you can also get a Cost-effectiveness ranking (Price per Eigenfactor)!

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