The difference between popularity and prestige in the sciences and in the social sciences: A bibliometric analysis

The status of a journal is commonly determined by two factors: popularity and prestige. While the former counts citations, the latter recursively weights them with the prestige of the citing journals. We make a thorough comparison of the bibliometric concepts of popularity and prestige for journals in the sciences and in the social sciences. We find that the two notions diverge more for the hard sciences, including physics, engineering, material sciences, and computer sciences, than they do for the geosciences, for biology-medical disciplines, and for the social sciences. Moreover, we identify the science and social science journals with the highest diverging ranks in popularity and prestige compilations. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.