Rankings of scholarly journals based on citation data are often met with scepticism by the scientific community. Part of the scepticism is due to disparity between the common perception of journals' prestige and their ranking based on citation counts. A more serious concern is the inappropriate use of journal rankings to evaluate the scientific influence of researchers. The paper focuses on analysis of the table of cross-citations among a selection of statistics journals. Data are collected from the Web of Science database published by Thomson Reuters. Our results suggest that modelling the exchange of citations between journals is useful to highlight the most prestigious journals, but also that journal citation data are characterized by considerable heterogeneity, which needs to be properly summarized. Inferential conclusions require care to avoid potential overinterpretation of insignificant differences between journal ratings. Comparison with published ratings of institutions from the UK's research assessment exercise shows strong correlation at aggregate level between assessed research quality and journal citation 'export scores' within the discipline of statistics.

中文翻译：

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统计期刊之间引文交换的统计建模。


基于引文数据的学术期刊排名经常受到科学界的怀疑。部分怀疑是由于对期刊威望的普遍看法与其基于引用计数的排名之间的差异。更严重的担忧是不恰当地使用期刊排名来评估研究人员的科学影响力。本文重点分析了一些统计期刊之间的交叉引用表。数据收集自汤森路透发布的 Web of Science 数据库。我们的结果表明，对期刊之间的引文交换进行建模有助于突出最负盛名的期刊，但期刊引文数据具有相当大的异质性，需要对其进行适当总结。推断性结论需要小心避免对期刊评级之间微不足道的差异进行潜在的过度解释。与英国研究评估活动中公布的机构评级进行比较表明，评估的研究质量与统计学科内期刊引用“出口分数”之间总体水平存在很强的相关性。