Researchers have proposed a new scheme for ranking the quality or impact of scientific journals that they say is more accurate than the Impact Factor, according to a linkurl:paper;http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchArticle.action?articleURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal published last week in PLoS ONE. Rather than relying on an average of citations to rate a journal, the system uses a mathematical model to characterize the typical number of citations that papers in specific journals are likely to receive. Since its inception in the 1960's by the Institute for Scientific Information (now Thomson Scientific), the Impact Factor has become the standard journal ranking system. It's calculated by adding up all the citations published in a particular journal during a two year period and dividing that number by the total number of citable papers during that time. But linkurl:Luis Amaral;http://amaral.chem-eng.northwestern.edu/ at Northwestern University and colleagues say that method has two major problems. First, it relies on the mean value, which "seems...
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