Citation influence for journal aggregates of scientific publications: Theory, with application to the literature of physics

Abstraet-A self-consistent methodology is developed for determining citation based influence measures for scientific journals, subfields and fields. Starting with the cross citing matrix between journals or between aggregates of journals, an eigenvalue problem is formulated leading to a size independent intluence weight for each journal or aggregate. Two other measures, the influence per publication and the total influence are then defined. Hierarchical influence diagrams and numerical data are presented to display journal interrelationships for journals within the subfields of physics. A wide range in influence is found between the most influentiaJ and least influenti~ or peripheral journals.