Toward alternative measures for ranking venues: a case of database research community

Ranking of publication venues is often closely related with important issues such as evaluating the contributions of individual scholars/research groups, or subscription decision making. The development of large-scale digital libraries and the availability of various meta data provide the possibility of building new measures more efficiently and accurately. In this work, we propose two novel measures for ranking the impacts of academic venues an easy-to-implement seed-based measure that does not use citation analysis, and a realistic browsing-based measure that takes an article reader's behavior into account. Both measures are computationally efficient yet mimic the results of the widely accepted Impact Factor. In particular, our proposal exploits the fact that: (1)in most disciplines, there are "top" venues that most people agree on; and (2) articles that appeared in good venues are more likely to be viewed by readers. Our proposed measures are extensively evaluated on a test case of the Database research community using two real bibliography data sets - ACM and DBLP. Finally, ranks of venues by our proposed measures are compared against the Impact Factor using the Spearman's rank correlation coefficient, and their positive rank order relationship is proved with a statistical significance test.