Google Starts Ranking Journals

 On April 1 2012,  Google announced a new feature to its Scholar service ...  called Google Scholar Metrics. The service follows the same principle that has made Google's web search engine so successful - when you are unsure what a user is looking for, give them a list of options ranked by a metric of popularity. In this instance, the users are academics ready to submit their next breakthrough but are uncertain which journal to choose. The solution Scholar Metrics offers is a database summarizing the sway of the distributors of scholarship "to help authors as they consider where to publish their new research".

Here's how it works. Google creates a list of all the articles a journal has published in a specified period of time. The citations to each article are counted in order to determine the publication's h-index, which is the largest number "h" such that each of the set of "h" articles were cited "h" or more times. As an example of how the h-index is calculated, consider a publication that has had six total articles having 2, 18, 11, 3, 22, and 9 citations, respectively. This gives the journal an h-index of four. Articles meeting the h-index criterion constitute the h-core. In the example, the core is the articles with 18, 11, 22 and 9 citations. Within the h-core, the median of the citation counts is used to assess the typical influence among the most highly cited set and is reported as the h-median.

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