Ranking The Top 20 Science Sites

Recently we had a conversation about where we ranked among science sites. There are a few measurement services out there, and they all give different numbers ( none of which are truly accurate) plus they all seem to have their own method for determining 'reach' that goes beyond simple traffic.

We decided to compare all the science sites, including ones that are doing different things like articles, blogging and news releases, against each other, using the results from two traffic ranking services, one opt-in popularity service and one service that measures inbound links.

We used traffic rankings first, assuming that they are going to be reasonably inaccurate for everyone the same way. They won't be 50% high for one site and 50% low for another and using two balances out the inequities. One service listed both US and international numbers for a few sites and only US numbers for the vast majority, so we used the US numbers for all to stay fair.

We used four methods of reach because any deficiencies in one measurement are likely balanced out in another. A site with few Technorati links, for example, may have a lot of traffic but may not have bloggers linking back to their articles while Alexa was only available for Internet Explorer until recently so that limited their usage.

We used Compete.com and Quantcast.com for traffic, Alexa.com for general reach and Technorati.com for links. We understand that each one of these probably has detractors. We gathered the pool of science sites by asking everyone we know what they read. Some had to be eliminated because we can't get individual traffic numbers. Example: we like ">Nova and ">Tierney Lab but their URLs resolve to PBS and the NY Times in traffic measuring services so they were excluded. That goes for a lot of sites that resolve to the NIH too.

Each rating service total provided a score between 1 and 100 for each site based on the numeric values they provided. The lowest site received 1 and the highest 100 with all others getting points in even increments between them.

Here, at the end, whittled from 48 at the start to the top 20 ( including a few surprises), are the most popular science sites out there. And we didn't even make the list!