That's a nice little app to see the relationships between journals, but I was expecting to see a Google-maps mashup where they ripped out the locations from published papers then plotted areas of high intellectual concentration (pardon the pun), to show which areas of the world are focusing on certain topics.
Also, for the rankings, they could rank fields based on how often papers are cited by other fields. For example, if a certain Mathematics paper is frequently quoted by physicists, it would contribute to Mathematics having a higher rating than Physics (over a large number of papers, a better average rating would emerge).
The journal rankings for physics appear to be bogus.
1. Rev Mod Phys
2. Mat Sci Eng R
3. Annu Rev Phys Chem
4. Phys Rep
5. Rep Prog Phys
6. Nano Lett
7. Prog Polym Sci
8. Adv Mater
9. Phys Rev Lett
10. Adv Polym Sci
Most agree that the top journals are:
1. Nature
2. Science
3. Nature Physics
4. Phys. Rev. Lett.
5. ...
please share your experience! I don't take this ranking wankery too seriously. There are some papers that I really love that were published is lesser known journals. I guess I was talking about AMO and cond.mat. which are the majority of physicists. These lists are obviously biased towards experimentalists, although theory occasionally makes it into science / nature.
This is interesting but it is not ranking or mapping scientific knowledge. What is mapped is academic fields. The scientific content is not mapped or ranked.
Also, for the rankings, they could rank fields based on how often papers are cited by other fields. For example, if a certain Mathematics paper is frequently quoted by physicists, it would contribute to Mathematics having a higher rating than Physics (over a large number of papers, a better average rating would emerge).