New Journal Ratings Questioned

A new system of ranking scientific journals irks some metrics experts.

Written byBob Grant

| 2 min read

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A novel scheme for rating the relative impact of scientific journals, unveiled this week by post-publication peer review outfit Faculty of 1000 (F1000), is being questioned by scholarly publication experts. The rankings, which place Nature on top of the list for biology journals and the New England Journal of Medicine atop the medicine heap, were built using scores awarded to papers published in 2010 in thousands of journals by F1000's 10,000-stong "faculty" of researchers and clinicians.

While the upper echelons of F1000's rankings, which include Cell, Science, PNAS, and Lancet, more or less correspond with rankings of the same journals based on their impact factors—a metric calculated via an algorithm that takes citation frequency, among other factors, into account—the list contains some surprises further down ...

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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