Journal Impact (Visibility) Factor

We have noticed that most of our readers moved to Feedly after Google Readers shut down.

Feedly offers nice stats on every feed, and we thought that could be an useful replacement of ‘journal impact factor’ in the internet age. Let us rather call it journal visibility factor, because if your paper is published in a more subscribed feed, it is more likely that others would notice it. Conceptually, the idea is not too different from the number of paper subscriptions of journals and magazines in the old days.

Here are the visibility stats for some journals and websites.

Science: Current Issue - 36K readers

Nature Communications - 3K readers

PNAS Current Issue - 7K readers

PLOS Genetics - 1.5K readers (added up multiple feeds)

Mike Eisen’s blog - 1K readers

PLOS Computational Biology - 1K readers

Moral of the story: consider publishing in Eisen’s blog by paying him a smaller fee than PLOS Comp Bio :)