Within-journal self-citations and the Pinski-Narin influence weights

Abstract

Abstract The Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is linearly sensitive to self-citations because each self-citation adds to the numerator, whereas the denominator is not affected. Pinski and Narin (1976) Influence Weights (IW) are not or marginally sensitive to these outliers on the main diagonal of a citation matrix and thus provide an alternative to JIFs. Whereas the JIFs are based on raw citation counts normalized by the number of publications in the previous two years, IWs are based on the eigenvectors in the matrix of aggregated journal-journal citations without a reference to size: the cited and citing sides are normalized and combined by a matrix approach. Upon normalization, IWs emerge as a vector; after recursive multiplication of the normalized matrix, IWs can be considered a network measure of prestige among the journals in the (sub)graph under study. As a consequence, the self-citations are integrated at the field level and no longer disturb the analysis as outliers. In our opinion, this independence of the diagonal values is a very desirable property of a measure of quality or impact. As an example, we elaborate Price’s (1981b) matrix of aggregated citation among eight biochemistry journals in 1977. Routines for the computation of IWs are made available at http://www.leydesdorff.net/iw .