Pubmed, impact factors, sorting and FriendFeed

I recently said on twitter that I wished I could sort the articles on pubmed using the impact factors of the journals. What followed was a demonstration of the power of friendfeed and was also observed under some other circumstances by Deepak Singh, Pedro Beltrao and some others... Within a day several persons joined the conversation on friendfeed and among them, Lars Juhl Jensen and Deepak suggested me to have a look at http://www.eigenfactor.org where the Eigenfactor is a measure of the journal's total importance to the scientific community. I must also cite Euan who was inspired by this discussion and created PubmedFaceoff, a photorealistic variant of the Chernoff Faces visualization technique based on pubmed.

Now let's go back to my sorting problem: I've joined the data from www.eigenfactor.org (with the kind permission of Carl Bergstrom) and from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/citmatch_help.html#JournalLists and I've uploaded this new dataset on IBM-ManyEyes:

http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/data
(You can play with this)

I wrote a java program reading a set of pubmed articles formatted in XML and using the scoring dataset. The algorithm is trivial: the XML element of the articles are removed from their parent node, sorted on their 'eigenfactors' retrieved from the journal <NlmId>, and then inserted back.

The source is available here

http://code.google.com

The executable jar (containing the scoring dataset) is available here:

http://lindenb.googlecode.com/files/sortpubmed.jar

Here is an example: I want to sort the articles about Charles Darwin. I've feched all the 372 articles in XML from this query

java -jar lindenb/build/sortpubmed.jar ~/pubmed_result.txt > result.xml

Here are the first articles:

    * Schmidhuber, Jürgen (Apr. 2008). "Comparing the legacies of Gauss, Pasteur and Darwin". Nature 452 (7187): 530. doi:10.1038/452530b. PMID 18256649. 
    * Padian, Kevin (Feb. 2008). "Darwin's enduring legacy". Nature 451 (7179): 632-4. doi:10.1038/451632a. PMID 18305520. 
    * Odling-Smee, Lucy (Mar. 2007). "Darwin and the 20-year publication gap". Nature 446 (7135): 478-9. doi:10.1038/446478a. PMID 17392756. 
    * Oliveira, João Gama; Barabási Albert-László (Oct. 2005). "Human dynamics: Darwin and Einstein correspondence patterns". Nature 437 (7063): 1251. doi:10.1038/4371251a. PMID 16724015. 
    * Kohn, David; Murrell Gina, Parker John, Whitehorn Mark (Aug. 2005). "What Henslow taught Darwin". Nature 436 (7051): 643-5. doi:10.1038/436643a. PMID 16079834. 
    * Ridley, Matt (Sep. 2004). "Crick and Darwin's shared publication in Nature". Nature 431 (7006): 244. doi:10.1038/431244a. PMID 15372004. 
    * Gruber, J W (Oct. 2001). "Owen was right, as Darwin's work continues". Nature 413 (6857): 669. doi:10.1038/35099725. PMID 11449244. 
    * Padian, K (Jul. 2001). "Owen's Parthian shot". Nature 412 (6843): 123-4. doi:10.1038/35084289. PMID 11606991. 
    * Rhodes, F H (. 1983). "Gradualism, punctuated equilibrium and the Origin of Species". Nature 305 (5932): 269-72. PMID 6353241. 
    * Maynard-Smith, J (Apr. 1982). "The century since Darwin". Nature 296 (5858): 599-601. PMID 7040979. 
    * "Darwin's questions" (Jan. 1969). Nature 221 (5178): 313. PMID 4884839. 
    * Hector, Andy; Hooper Rowan (Jan. 2002). "Ecology. Darwin and the first ecological experiment". Science 295 (5555): 639-40. doi:10.1126/science.1064815. PMID 11809960. 
    * Corsi (May. 1987). "Further Letters of Darwin: The Correspondence of Charles Darwin". Science 236 (4804): 988-989. doi:10.1126/science.236.4804.988. PMID 17812771. 
    * Schweber (May. 1985). "Darwin's Earliest Letters: The Correspondence of Charles Darwin". Science 228 (4701): 838-841. doi:10.1126/science.228.4701.838. PMID 17815024. 
    * Lewin, R (Aug. 1982). "Darwin died at a most propitious time". Science 217 (4561): 717-8. PMID 7048528. 
    * Gould, S J (Apr. 1982). "Darwinism and the expansion of evolutionary theory". Science 216 (4544): 380-7. PMID 7041256. 
    * Zirkle (May. 1964). "Charles Darwin". Science 144 (3619): 724-725. doi:10.1126/science.144.3619.724-a. PMID 17807061. 
    * Cholodny (Nov. 1937). "CHARLES DARWIN AND THE MODERN THEORY OF TROPISMS". Science 86 (2238): 468. doi:10.1126/science.86.2238.468. PMID 17815459. 
    * Leidy (Sep. 1929). "CEREMONY ATTENDING THE OPENING OF DOWN HOUSE, THE HOME OF CHARLES DARWIN". Science 70 (1810): 228-231. doi:10.1126/science.70.1810.228. PMID 17775389. 
    * Osborn (Jun. 1929). "GIFT TO DOWN HOUSE OF THE ORIGINAL LETTERS OF CHARLES DARWIN TO FRITZ MULLER". Science 69 (1799): 645. doi:10.1126/science.69.1799.645. PMID 17791947. 
    * Osborn (Dec. 1926). "A CONTEMPORARY OF CHARLES DARWIN". Science 64 (1669): 623-624. doi:10.1126/science.64.1669.623-a. PMID 17834475. 
    * Sampson (Sep. 1909). "LETTERS FROM CHARLES DARWIN". Science 30 (766): 303-304. doi:10.1126/science.30.766.303. PMID 17837456. 
    * Ayala, Francisco J (May. 2007). "Darwin's greatest discovery: design without designer". Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 104 Suppl 1: 8567-73. doi:10.1073/pnas.0701072104. PMID 17494753.