As much as we like watching reruns of The Prisoner, we have to say it is time we were assigned a number as we attempt to quantify scientific progress both in general and for the individual in a virtual world in which scientific progress is based on more than the impact of a journal article. What do you think? Who knows—perhaps some day you will be rewarded for your time, energy, and intellect that go into a thoughtful response to this Perspective.

The InfoVis 2004 contest led to the development of several bibliography visualization systems. Even though each of these systems offers some unique views of the bibliography data, there is no single best system offering all the desired views. We have thus studied how to consolidate the desirable functionalities of these systems into a cohesive design. We have also designed a few novel visualization methods. This paper presents our findings and creation: BiblioViz, a bibliography visualization system that gives the maximum number of views of the data using a minimum number of visualization constructs in a unified fashion.

This report describes the results of automatic processing of a large number of scientific papers according to a rigorously defined criterion of coupling. The population of papers under study was ordered into groups that satisfy the stated criterion of interrelation. An examination of the papers that constitute the groups shows a high degree of logical correlation.

uses MAM: a Multi-Level Aggregation Method for optimizing modularity community detection technique from V. Blondel, J.-L. Guillaume, R. Lambiotte, and E. Lefebvre (2008) to detect scientific specialties in raw cocitation networks (not using Jaccard, Dice, Cosine or other similarity measures)

The launching of Scopus and Google Scholar, and methodological developments in Social Network Analysis have made many more indicators for evaluating journals available than the traditional Impact Factor, Cited Half-life, and Immediacy Index of the ISI. In this study, these new indicators are compared with one another and with the older ones. Do the various indicators measure new dimensions of the citation networks, or are they highly correlated among them? Are they robust and relatively stable over time? Two main dimensions are distinguished—size and impact—which together shape influence. The H-index combines the two dimensions and can also be considered as an indicator of reach (like Indegree). PageRank is mainly an indicator of size, but has important interactions with centrality measures. The Scimago Journal Ranking (SJR) indicator provides an alternative to the Journal Impact Factor, but the computation is less easy. Keywords: impact, H-index, journal, citation, centrality, ranking