Citation by Citation, New Maps Chart Hot Research and Scholarship’s Hidden Terrain
Imagine a Google Maps of scholarship, a set of tools sophisticated enough to help researchers locate hot research, spot hidden connections to other fields, and even identify new disciplines as they emerge in the sprawling terrain of scholarly communication. Creating new ways to identify and analyze patterns in millions of journal citations, a team led by two biologists, Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin D. West, and a physicist, Martin Rosvall, has set out to build just such a guidance system.
This is a great idea. However, I see a problem with their rewarding larger journals with higher scores (relevancy). The biggest problem is how they will judge which is a “good” journal. Distribution? If so, I sure hope that open online journals will benefit from viewership numbers. If they do this, I’m all for the new system. I think it would be a great place to do research and simply browsing for interesting stuff.