Cross Validated is a question and answer site for people interested in statistics, machine learning, data analysis, data mining, and data visualization. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I am looking through articles citing an article I'm reading - and I wish to judge how much that citing article is "important" or "good" by itself.
one way of knowing would be if I had known how "distinguished" that journal was. Which leads me to my question:
What measures are there (and where can I find them) for a journal "importance" or "impact"?
(I know of Impact Factor score. But I wonder if there are other such measures, and which are more applicable to statistical journals)
Anne-Wil Harzing has a useful site with some free software called Publish or Perish. The site discusses a number of journal, article, and author impact factor metrics. The software uses Google Scholar to calculate citation based impact factor metrics.
This might be a good place to start. Eigenfactor is a scholarly journal and article scoring, and ranking, system. It is a free service offered by the University of Washington. The algorithm, methodology, data set composition and update frequency is described on the Eigenfactor website.
There's a nice website: http://www.arnetminer.org/page/conference-rank/html/Journal.html - however, it only contains computer science conferences.
It's an interesting question because publication venue is an extremely important factor for the reception of an article - most of these concepts however live inside the heads of the people working in the field; all these metrics imo just try to mimic those concepts. Although having argued in a comment to your question in favor of metrics, actually looking (even superficially) at as many articles as possible from different sources should let you develop an intuition about good and bad publication venues, which is, on the long run, probably the most efficient tool you can get.