Abstract
The links among scholarly citations creates a tremendous network that reveals patterns of influence and flows of ideas. The systematic evaluation of these networks can be used to create aggregate measures of journal influence. To understand the citation patterns and compare influence among ecology journals, I compiled 11 popular metrics for 110 ecology journals: Journal Impact Factor (JIF), 5-year Journal Impact Factor (JIF5), Eigenfactor, Article Influence (AI), Source-Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP), SCImago Journal Report (SJR), h-index, hc-index, e-index, g-index, and AR-index. All metrics were positively correlated among ecology journals; however, there was still considerable variation among metrics. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, and Ecology Letters were the top three journals across metrics on a per article basis. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Ecology, and Molecular Ecology had the greatest overall influence on science, as indicated by the Eigenfactor. There was much greater variability among the other metrics because they focus on the mostly highly cited papers from each journal. Each influence metric has its own strengths and weaknesses, and therefore its own uses. Researchers interested in the average influence of articles in a journal would be best served by referring to AI scores. Despite the usefulness of citation-based metrics, they should not be overly emphasized by publishers and they should be avoided by granting agencies and in personnel decisions. Finally, citation-based metrics only capture one aspect of scientific influence, they do not consider the influence on legislation, land-use practices, public perception, or other effects outside of the publishing network.
Highlights
Citations serve as a link to previously published materials and provide credit for original ideas
I identified 134 ecology-related journals based on the Web of Science (WoS) Journal Citation Reports (JCR) Ecology category
I compiled 1,084,169 citations for 63,868 articles from 131 ecology journals from Google Scholar searches for articles published from 2007–2011
Summary
Citations serve as a link to previously published materials and provide credit for original ideas. 3) insufficient time period biased to rapid production journals (McGarty 2000, Cameron 2005), 4) inappropriate distributional representation by using a mean from a skewed distribution (Seglen 1997, Falagas and Alexiou 2008), 5) excessive influence of review articles that biases metrics among some journals (Cameron 2005), 6) inflation of the JIF over time (Neff and Olden 2010), 7) over simplification of journal influence (Pendlebury 2009), 8) difficulty of comparing journals across disciplines and the influence of multidisciplinary journals (Cameron 2005, Pendlebury 2009), 9) exclusion of many journals from the database (Cameron 2005, Pendlebury 2009), 10) ease of manipulation by publishers to increase their JIF through altered publication practices (Falagas and Alexiou 2008) In response to these criticisms, numerous other citation-based metrics have been proposed. These Altmetrics are beyond the scope of this paper but may be useful for appreciating the full reach of particular papers and for inclusion in grant reports
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