Worldwide, the number of scientific journals and published papers are increasing. This continued increase in peer reviewed work is making it harder for scientist to find the papers they need or publish the papers that they want others in their field to see.

A team at Northwestern University believes they have a solution. The group has developed a new mathematical algorithm to rank journals according to quality. The team analyzed 23 million papers representing 200 academic fields from 1955 to 2006. The results from their analysis produced 200 separate tables of rankings by field and will be published February 27 in PLoS ONE.

Lead researcher Luís A. Nunes Amaral, associate professor of chemical and biological engineering in Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, and his team found that the time scale for a published paper’s complete accumulation of citations — a gauge for determining the full impact of the paper — can range from less than one year to 26 years, depending on the journal. Using their new method, the Northwestern researchers can estimate the total number of citations a paper in a specific journal will get in the future and thus determine — right now — the paper’s likely impact in its field. This is the kind of information university administrators and funding agencies should find helpful when they are evaluating faculty members for tenure and researchers for grant awards.

Since the rankings have not been published yet it is hard to critique, however it should be stressed that if this kind of information is used by funding agencies to determine awards then many worthwhile basic research studies may become even further under funded. Hopefully this type of mechanism is carefully evaluated and used sparingly until further analysis of the algorithm and its accuracy can be done.