P-Rank: An indicator measuring prestige in heterogeneous scholarly networks

Abstract

Ranking scientific productivity and prestige are often limited to homogeneous networks. These networks are unable to account for the multiple factors that constitute the scholarly communication and reward system. This study proposes a new informetric indicator, P-Rank, for measuring prestige in heterogeneous scholarly networks containing articles, authors, and journals. P-Rank differentiates the weight of each citation based on its citing papers, citing journals, and citing authors. Articles from 16 representative library and information science journals are selected as the dataset. Principle Component Analysis is conducted to examine the relationship between P-Rank and other bibliometric indicators. We also compare the correlation and rank variances between citation counts and P-Rank scores. This work provides a new approach to examining prestige in scholarly communication networks in a more comprehensive and nuanced way.