A principal component analysis of 39 scientific impact measures.

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

SUBMITTER: Bollen J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2699100 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature