Eigenfactor and Article Influence Score
Eigenfactor
A journal's Eigenfactor score is measured as its importance to the scientific community. Scores are scaled so that the sum of all journal scores is 100. In 2006, Nature had the highest score of 1.992.
- Intended to reflect the influence and prestige of journals.
- Created to help capture the value of publication output vs. journal quality (i.e. the value of a single publication in a major journal vs. many publications in minor journals).
Article Influence Score
The mean Article Influence Score is 1.00. An Article Influence Score greater than 1.00 indicates that the articles in a journal have an above-average influence.
- Measures the average influence, per article, of the papers published in a journal.
- Calculated by dividing the Eigenfactor by the number of articles published in the journal.
Advantages of Eigenfactor/Article Influence Score:
- Can be accessed for free.
- Includes a built-in evaluation period of five years.
- Attempts to give a more accurate representation of the merit of citations than do raw citation counts.
Disadvantages of Eigenfactor/Article Influence Score:
- Eigenfactor assigns journals to a single category, making it more difficult to compare across disciplines.
- Some argue that Eigenfactor score isn't much different than raw citation counts (see a blog post on this topic by The Scholarly Kitchen, for example).
Below is an example of the Eigenfactor and Article Influence Scores for a few journals. You can search the Eigenfactor Website to find the scores for journals of interest.
