  Journal rankings are widely used and are often based on citation data in
combination with a network perspective. We argue that some of these
network-based rankings can produce misleading results. From a theoretical point
of view, we show that the standard network modelling approach of citation data
at the journal level (i.e., the projection of paper citations onto journals)
introduces fictitious relations among journals. To overcome this problem, we
propose a citation path perspective, and empirically show that rankings based
on the network and the citation path perspective are very different. Based on
our theoretical and empirical analysis, we highlight the limitations of
standard network metrics, and propose a method to overcome these limitations
and compute journal rankings.
