[noelwelsh]

It's interesting to note that the 5th highest ranked publication is arXiv. For those who aren't familiar with it, arxiv.org is an open-access repository of academic papers, mostly in quantitative science. In my field (computer science) it is standard practice to deposit a copy of one's papers in arxiv before submitting them for publication, and arxiv is the place to find the latest research.

There is currently a lot of hand-wringing in academia about open access publications. Everyone wants it, and it is trivial to switch a field to it (machine learning has done so, for the most part), but it requires the leaders in the field to lead the change and they are normally too invested in the status quo. What the high ranking of arxiv suggests to me is that while people maintain lip service to the idea that the (mostly closed) publications are important and the maintain the definite version of a publication, the reality is that no-one gives a damn and goes to arxiv when they want to read something.

[yungchin]

It's still surprising that arxiv is that high up. You'd think most people would cite the definitive publications, not the preprints at arxiv?

Anyway, given that in some fields _everything_ that's written goes to arxiv, arxiv will [by definition][1] have a very high h-index. The thing is, the h-index was conceived to compare individuals, not journals.

[1]: http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0508025

[streptomycin]

Google Scholar also indexes papers that are only published on arxiv, which likely often include citations to other things on arxiv.

[stfu]

The question is how "serious" Google scholar rankings are going to be seen. In the past quite a few demonstrations have shown, that the Google scholar ranking/citation system can be gamed with relatively little effort. Let's hope that it will have more impact than those University rankings which calculate the scores based on aspects such as the inbound/outbound link ratio (as some web"metric" rankings indeed do).