  The status of an actor in a social context is commonly defined in terms of
two factors: the total number of endorsements the actor receives from other
actors and the prestige of the endorsing actors. These two factors indicate the
distinction between popularity and expert appreciation of the actor,
respectively. We refer to the former as popularity and to the latter as
prestige. These notions of popularity and prestige also apply to the domain of
scholarly assessment. The ISI Impact Factor (ISI IF) is defined as the mean
number of citations a journal receives over a 2 year period. By merely counting
the amount of citations and disregarding the prestige of the citing journals,
the ISI IF is a metric of popularity, not of prestige. We demonstrate how a
weighted version of the popular PageRank algorithm can be used to obtain a
metric that reflects prestige. We contrast the rankings of journals according
to their ISI IF and their weighted PageRank, and we provide an analysis that
reveals both significant overlaps and differences. Furthermore, we introduce
the Y-factor which is a simple combination of both the ISI IF and the weighted
PageRank, and find that the resulting journal rankings correspond well to a
general understanding of journal status.
