Scientific subject categories of Web of Knowledge ranked according to their multidimensional prestige of influential journals

Abstract

A journal may be considered as having dimension-specific prestige when its score, based on a given journal ranking model, exceeds a threshold value. But a journal has multidimensional prestige only if it is a prestigious journal with respect to a number of dimensions—e.g., Institute for Scientific Information Impact Factor, immediacy index, eigenfactor score, and article influence score. The multidimensional prestige of influential journals takes into account the fact that several prestige indicators should be used for a distinct analysis of the impact of scholarly journals in a subject category. After having identified the multidimensionally influential journals, their prestige scores can be aggregated to produce a summary measure of multidimensional prestige for a subject category, which satisfies numerous properties. Using this measure of multidimensional prestige to rank subject categories, we have found the top scientific subject categories of Web of Knowledge as of 2010. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.