The Eigenfactor Metrics: A network approach to assessing scholarly journals

Limited time and budgets have created a legitimate need for quantitative measures of scholarly work. The well-known journal impact factor is the leading measure of this sort; here we describe an alternative approach based on the full structure of the scholarly citation network. The Eigenfactor and Article Influence Score use an iterative ranking scheme similar to Google's PageRank algorithm. With this approach, citations from top journals are weighted more heavily than citations from lower-tier publications. We describe these metrics and the rankings that they provide