  The rank of a journal based on simple citation information is a popular
measure. The simplicity and availability of rankings such as Impact Factor,
Eigenfactor and SciMago Journal Rank based on trusted commercial sources
ensures their widespread use for many important tasks despite the well-known
limitations of such rankings. In this paper we look at an alternative approach
based on information on papers from social and mainstream media sources. Our
data comes from altmetric.com who identify mentions of individual academic
papers in sources such as Twitter, Facebook, blogs and news outlets. We
consider several different methods to produce a ranking of journals from such
data. We show that most (but not all) schemes produce results, which are
roughly similar, suggesting that there is a basic consistency between social
media based approaches and traditional citation based methods. Most ranking
schemes applied to one data set produce relatively little variation and we
suggest this provides a measure of the uncertainty in any journal rating. The
differences we find between data sources also shows they are capturing
different aspects of journal impact. We conclude a small number of such ratings
will provide the best information on journal impact.
