Comparison of peer and citation assessment of the influence of scientific journals

Abstract

Abstract A survey was undertaken to ascertain the extent of agreement between scientists' subjective assessment of the average influence per article for articles in 58 different scientific journals, when compared with corresponding citation influence ratings for articles in the same journals. The scientists' assessments were derived from questionnaires sent to faculty at 97 American universities covering journals in ten different research fields. A strong positive relationship was found to exist between the scientists' assessment of journal influence and the citation influence ratings, with product‐moment and Spearman rank correlations in the 0.7–0.9 range for seven of the ten fields.