EigenFactor
I came across a very cool project to rank academic journals: EigenFactor.org. Quoting the about page:
Eigenfactor.org is a non-commercial academic research project sponsored by the Bergstrom lab in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington. We aim to develop novel methods for evaluating the influence of scholarly periodicals and for mapping the structure of academic research. We are committed to sharing our findings with interested members of the public, including librarians, journal editors, publishers, and authors of scholarly articles.
The ranking is done using an algorithm similar to Google’s PageRank. Read about the other features on their “Why EigenRank?” page.
Here for example is a listing of the highest ranking (by eigenfactor) journals in Mathematical Physics:
- PHYSICAL REVIEW E
- JOURNAL OF PHYSICS A-MATHEMATICAL AND GE
- COMMUNICATIONS IN MATHEMATICAL PHYSICS
- JOURNAL OF COMPUTATIONAL PHYSICS
- JOURNAL OF MATHEMATICAL PHYSICS
- PHYSICA D-NONLINEAR PHENOMENA
- JOURNAL OF STATISTICAL PHYSICS
- COMPUTER PHYSICS COMMUNICATIONS
- MODERN PHYSICS LETTERS A
- CHAOS
I’m yet to figure out a way to make use of this service effectively. My day job deals with Medical Imaging, which is a form of Computer Vision, which in turn falls under Artificial Intelligence. Computational Anatomy, one of the emerging subfields of medical imaging is fairly mathematical, using ideas from group theory and functional analysis. To add more to the mix, one of the most used algorithms for image/volume segmentation is the Level Set Method, first published in the Journal of Computational Physics. I can’t judge a paper just by looking at where it’s published, can I?