A principal component analysis of 39 scientific impact measures.
other · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 19562078.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0006022 and PMC identifier 2699100.
- Licence recorded as CC0.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The impact of scientific publications has traditionally been expressed in terms of citation counts. However, scientific activity has moved online over the past decade. To better capture scientific impact in the digital era, a variety of new impact measures has been proposed on the basis of social network analysis and usage log data. Here we investigate how these new measures relate to each other, and how accurately and completely they express scientific impact. METHODOLOGY: We performed a principal component analysis of the rankings produced by 39 existing and proposed measures of scholarly impact that were calculated on the basis of both citation and usage log data. CONCLUSIONS: Our results indicate that the notion of scientific impact is a multi-dimensional construct that can not be adequately measured by any single indicator, although some measures are more suitable than others. The commonly used citation Impact Factor is not positioned at the core of this construct, but at its periphery, and should thus be used with caution.
Medical subject headings
- Bibliometrics
- Journal Impact Factor
- Periodicals as Topic
- Publishing