Google: Updated Scholar Metrics: Now Grouped by Research Area and new statistical model;

Earlier this year, Google (http://scholar.google.fr/) launched Scholar Metrics which provides an easy way for authors to quickly gauge the visibility and influence of recent articles in scholarly publications. Today, Google is updating Scholar Metrics to make it easier for you to explore publications in research areas that you are interested in.

To get started, you can browse publications in broad areas like Engineering & Computer Science, Health & Medical Sciences, or Social Sciences.
You will see the top 20 publications in the area ordered by their five-year h-index and h-median metrics. To see which articles in a publication were cited the most and who cited them, click on its h-index number.

To explore more specific research areas, select one of the broad areas, click on the "Subcategories" link and then choose one of the options. For example: Databases & Information Systems, Development Economics, Virology or Composite Materials.

Google uses a statistical model based on the articles published in the last five years to compute the set of publications associated with each research area. Recognizing the multi-disciplinary nature of many publications, our model allows a publication to be associated with more than one research area.

Browsing by research area is, as yet, available only for English publications. As previously, you can browse the top 100 publications in several languages. You can, of course, also search for specific publications by words in their titles.

Scholar Metrics currently covers articles published between 2007 and 2011. It only includes journal articles from websites that follow our inclusion guidelines, selected conference articles in Computer Science & Electrical Engineering and preprints from arXiv, SSRN, NBER, and RePEC. Scholar Metrics does not include publications with fewer than 100 articles, nor publications that received no citations in 2007-2011.

The metrics are based on citations from all articles that were indexed in Google Scholar as of November 15, 2012. Since our previous metrics were based on citations from all articles indexed as of April 1, 2012, the new numbers are expected to be a bit higher. Alas, that does not indicate that your favorite journal has become more influential over this short period.

For more details, see the Scholar Metrics help page.
Ref: http://googlescholar.blogspot.fr/2012/11/updated-scholar-metrics-now-grouped-by.html