Scientific citations may be designed to give credit where credit is due, but that's not all they're good for. "We think of citation patterns as the flow of information," says Carl Bergstrom, a biologist at the University of Washington. "That's what a citation is — the trace that an idea flowed from one place to another." Bergstrom's innovative Eigenfactor project is based on examining this flow of ideas. < Back | Continue >

Bergstrom uses network science and information theory to analyze how often certain scientific papers cite other papers and evaluate the relative importance of a variety of scientific journals. Rather than merely calculating how often a certain journal is cited, Bergstrom's algorithm also analyzes who is citing that journal, calculating, in essence, how much the citations are worth. The results, which are available online at Eigenfactor.org, allow scientists to easily see each journal's overall value, or Eigenfactor. < Back | Continue >

But Bergstrom has bigger plans than merely analyzing the importance of various journals. He wants to see how scientists have made science organize itself and change the world like a cartographer once could: "If we can map science, we can help researchers get their bearings, move efficiently among fields in their interdisciplinary endeavors, and find what they need to be reading." < Back | Continue >

More: eigenfactor.org