nbsp;Eigenfactor.org uses data from Thompson (publishers) to create a browsable map of relationships between academic disciplines, as evidenced in the citations published in top academic journals over the last five years.
From Eigenfactor’s home page you can also search for a specific journal and find two numbers that describe the journal:
- Article Influence (AI): a measure of a journal’s prestige based on per article citations and comparable to Impact Factor.
- Eigenfactor (EF): a measure of the overall value provided by all of the articles published in a given journal in a year.
Eigenfactor is a research project sponsored by the Bergstrom lab in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington.
The Information Aesthetics blog describes Citespace as “a powerful network data visualization technique that facilitates the detection of emerging trends & transient patterns in scientific literature. CiteSpace is based on 2 concepts: ‘research fronts’, defined as an emergent grouping of concepts & underlying research issues & ‘intellectual base’, the network of citations & co-citations of a research front in scientific literature. the size of a node is proportional to the normalized citation counts in the latest time interval.”
Created by Chaomei Chen at Drexel University, Citespace is Java-based and rather less user-friendly than Eigenfactor (by which I mean you have to download the software and feed it some data in order to produce a pretty picture), though it seems to have potential as a visual analysis tool.