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Evaluating journal impact based on weighted citations

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Abstract

Publishing at high-rank journals is a common objective to most researchers, and there’s a crucial need for a journal ranking system with universal recognition. This paper presents a quantitative approach to rank scientific journals. The approach, HR-PageRank, combines weighted PageRank according to author’s H-index, and relevance between citing and cited papers. The output of the proposed approach is compared against journal impact factor, H5-index, PageRank algorithm and China Computer Federation ranking list. The experiments of quantifying scholarly impact objectively are conducted in two real scholarly data sets: (1) Microsoft Academic Graph and (2) Digital Bibliography and Library Project. Our experimental results indicate that HR-PageRank algorithm outperforms the well-known PageRank algorithm in finding the influential journals according to Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient, discounted cumulated gain and the correlation C.

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Notes

  1. http://aka.ms/academicgraph.

  2. http://dblp.uni-trier.de.

  3. https://www.scopus.com.

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Acknowledgements

The author thanks Xiaomei Bai and Haozhen Liu (School of Software, Dalian University of Technology) for support in data processing and algorithm implementations.

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Correspondence to Fuli Zhang.

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Zhang, F. Evaluating journal impact based on weighted citations. Scientometrics 113, 1155–1169 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2510-z

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