There is no such thing as “a site’s page rank.” Only webpages have page rank, not websites. There is no equivalent to the entity of a journal in how page rank is calculated.

here are some interesting bits:

by Anurag A. Agrawal:

“Perhaps more mathy people, maybe sociologists, should take a look at this issue.”

“I don’t advocate getting rid of the impact factor… I simply think we should keep an open mind and at least use several indices… (including our own personal judgment of the prestige of the publication venue). There is no way that this process is going to be made simpler, with a silver bullet, and there is also no possibility to make it completely objective. Our only hope is to not be locked into a self-imposed monopoly where impact factor is god. In addition, we should try to close the door on abuses … I think the clear path here is to embarrass the editors or publishers that make compromising requests!”

” It may be worth the effort of some governmental agencies, especially those that fund scientific research, to investigate impact factors and journal practices.”

“Anurag A. Agrawal, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell University, has served on the editorial boards of five journals. He recently published a letter in Trends in Ecology and Evolution decrying some common editorial practices designed to raise citations and journal-impact factors.”

In these circumstances, most articles won’t be that heavy on references to recently published articles, so gaming by editors can really push up ratings.

Now, of course, this could be a good thing or a bad thing. One thing that draws in direct responses is when an article just seems plain wrong. But another is when it really does say something important that inspires new research, rather than just making some points that are tangentially relevant elsewhere.

and what is far more insideous is when the research leads to a reform of public education teaching methods. If you have not looked in a public high school textbook on history in a while, you might be suprised.

Academics I know tend to have a small set of journals they respect a lot, based on how many articles in each issue they’d consider relevant and good work. Among the larger set of journals, they browse, and seek the issues out for specific articles, or authors. These ‘idio-rankings’ aren’t standardized, but they are what drive their reading and recommending. I can’t see most of these profs changing their habits based on ISI algorithms, even if ISI had good ones. In unfamiliar subfields they’d just ask a colleague, or roll dice or something. Anything rather than defer to some institution.

So perhaps in the future journals will try to require that authors of articles not reprint them in their collected works.

The games played by editors to drive up the citation counts and impact factors of their own journals are obviously detrimental to the scientific process and hence unacceptable. But this simply implies that impact factors should be calculated without including self-citations at the journal level.