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In my last blog post I wrote about impact factors and h-index for different journals. That got me wondering about what the h5 index is for all of the journals that I read and may want to publish in. I could look them all up individually, but that sounds boring and monotonous. I’d much rather figure out how to get R to do it for me. I’ve never done this kind of thing with R before, so it took a little while, but I wrote a simple function that takes a journal name and returns its h5-index.
You have to spell the journal’s title exactly as it appears in Google Scholar to make sure you get the right h5 index, but otherwise it seems to be reasonably robust. Here it is:
The function is designed for a single journal name, so for my set of journals, I used the adply function from the plyr package:
After a little clean-up, I got what I was looking for:
You have to spell the journal’s title exactly as it appears in Google Scholar to make sure you get the right h5 index, but otherwise it seems to be reasonably robust. Here it is:
getH5 <- function(journal.name){
require(RCurl)
require(XML)
require(stringr)
#replace spaces in journal name with "+" for google search
search.str <- str_replace_all(journal.name, " ", "+")
#make the URL
url <- paste("http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&view_op=search_venues&vq=", search.str, sep = "")
#retrieve the webpage from the URL
webpage <- getURL(url)
#pull the table of h5 values out of the page
x <- readHTMLTable(webpage)
#get the h5-index for the specified journal (there are likely to be other partial matches), use NA if the journal name is not found
if(length(x)==0){
h5 <- NA
warning("Could not find any publications matching ", journal.name, immediate.=T)
} else {
tab <- x[[1]]
h5 <- as.numeric(as.character(tab$"h5-index"[tab$Publication == journal.name]))
if(length(h5)==0) h5 <- NA
}
#arrange in a convenient form
dat <- data.frame(Journal = journal.name, H5 = h5)
return(dat)
}The function is designed for a single journal name, so for my set of journals, I used the adply function from the plyr package:
jh <- adply(journals, 1, "getH") jh.sorted <- jh[order(-jh$H5),] #sort them by decreasing h5-index
After a little clean-up, I got what I was looking for:
| Journal | H5 |
|---|---|
| PLoS ONE | 120 |
| Nature Neuroscience | 115 |
| Brain | 103 |
| Trends in Cognitive Sciences | 86 |
| Psychological Science | 79 |
| Neuropsychologia | 67 |
| Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience | 64 |
| Psychological Review | 62 |
| Cognition | 60 |
| Neuroscience Letters | 50 |
| Experimental Brain Research | 46 |
| The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America | 46 |
| Psychonomic Bulletin & Review | 45 |
| Journal of Experimental Psychology: General | 44 |
| Biological Psychology | 44 |
| Journal of Memory and Language | 43 |
| Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition | 43 |
| Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance | 42 |
| Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior | 41 |
| Psychology and Aging | 41 |
| Brain and Language | 39 |
| Brain and Cognition | 39 |
| Cognitive Science | 38 |
| BMC Neuroscience | 38 |
| The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology | 36 |
| Ear and Hearing | 35 |
| Cognitive Psychology | 34 |
| Acta Psychologica | 34 |
| Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience | 33 |
| Memory & Cognition | 32 |
| Frontiers in Human Neuroscience | 29 |
| Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics | 28 |
| Language and Cognitive Processes | 27 |
| Topics in Cognitive Science | 23 |
| Cognitive Neuropsychology | 21 |
| Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology | 18 |
| Neurocase | 18 |
| Cognitive neuroscience | 10 |