[Asis-l] Google Starts Ranking Journals

[Library, Economics Collection]

Dear Gerry,

The new service does not just apply to journals as such - but digital 'containers' for scholarly work in general.

The Google ranking consists of a mix of aggregated resources - and also individual journal platforms.  The aggregated platforms/databases also include articles.

For example, on the new 100 list (of all disciplines) the 'top' resources in Economics (or resources with significant economics content) - are:

4. RePEc [a distributed network of WPs, articles, pre-prints, web documents, e-books &c.  This database also includes bibliographical references to most major economics journals]
7. Social Science Research Network [an online 'collaborative', strong in Law and Economics]
34. NBER [U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research working papers and data]

... This is followed by 'individual' journals:

51. The American Economic Review
71. The Journal of Finance
75. Journal of Financial Economics
77. Review of Financial Studies

Although the mix of aggregated portals with individual journals presents complications - Google is right to try to put these resources together.  Not least because readers are targeting the article level.  Quality 'containers' such as NBER, arXiv and PLos ONE take the reader to the article - and often add data, communications tools and other resources of scholarly value.

With best wishes,

Thomas








-----Original Message-----
From: asis-l-bounces at asis.org [mailto:asis-l-bounces at asis.org] On Behalf Of McKiernan, Gerard [LIB]
Sent: 15 April 2012 17:11
To: asis-l at asis.org
Cc: McKiernan, Gerard [LIB]
Subject: [Asis-l] Google Starts Ranking Journals

*** Apologies for Receipt of Duplicate Postings ***

Colleagues/

On April 1 2012,  Google announced a new feature to its Scholar service ...  called Google Scholar Metrics. The service follows the same principle that has made Google's web search engine so successful - when you are unsure what a user is looking for, give them a list of options ranked by a metric of popularity. In this instance, the users are academics ready to submit their next breakthrough but are uncertain which journal to choose. The solution Scholar Metrics offers is a database summarizing the sway of the distributors of scholarship "to help authors as they consider where to publish their new research".

Here's how it works. Google creates a list of all the articles a journal has published in a specified period of time. The citations to each article are counted in order to determine the publication's h-index, which is the largest number "h" such that each of the set of "h" articles were cited "h" or more times. As an example of how the h-index is calculated, consider a publication that has had six total articles having 2, 18, 11, 3, 22, and 9 citations, respectively. This gives the journal an h-index of four. Articles meeting the h-index criterion constitute the h-core. In the example, the core is the articles with 18, 11, 22 and 9 citations. Within the h-core, the median of the citation counts is used to assess the typical influence among the most highly cited set and is reported as the h-median.

[more]

BTW: What will Google do next? Develop a driverless automobile ? [:-)

Source and Links Available Via

[  http://bit.ly/HKQ9Zb  ]

Gerry McKiernan
Associate Professor 
and 
Science and Technology Librarian
Iowa State University 
152 Parks Library 
Ames IA 50011

http://scholarship20.blogspot.com/ 

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