Posted for Emma Marris

You might recall a neat site we profiled last July that ranked journals not by citations but by value for money—the eigenfactor.

Well the team behind the eigenfactor have not rested on their laurels. Instead, they have teamed up with data visualization whiz Moritz Stefaner of Well-formed data to make super-sexy looking visualizations of how and how much journals and fields cite one another, which journals are the best value, and how a given journal’s importance has risen and fallen over time.

See them in all their glory at well-formed.eigenfactor.org and read Stefaner’s notes on how he approached the project at his blog.

Carl Bergstrom, the lead player in the eigenfactor team, says the intended audience is curious scientists as well as data-visualization enthusiasts. “What we are experimenting with here is how good algorithms and good data can combine with intelligently designed and aesthetically beautiful ways of displaying that data.”

Bergstrom left all the aesthetic decisions, such as which colours to use, strictly to Stefaner. “Moritz is the designer,” he says. “I shouldn’t be allowed to do these things. My wife could tell you that.”

Meanwhile, in other impact-factor news, Public Library of Science ONE has recently announced (registration required) that it will add a grab-bag of “alternative impact data” from Scopus, user ratings, press coverage and the like to each article. The Scientist quotes Peter Binfield, the journal’s managing editor, as saying “Our idea is to throw up a bunch of metrics and see what people use.”

Update: Carl Bergstrom has asked us to make the following clear: “We also rank by citations. We just have additional features that let you take price into account. But the basic Eigenfactor scores as visualized at the new site are purely citation-based, and independent of price.” Apologies for any confusion. Ed.

Image: citation patterns for Nature (click for larger version).