Scientifically meaningful sources of bibliometrics
Although just a start, we had a "journal club" over at the stats.se site on such bibliometrics, and had a chat over this particular article;


  Arnold, Douglas N. &amp; Kristine K. Fowler. 2011. Nefarious Numbers.
  Notices of the AMS 58(3): 434-437. PDF link from publisher
  
  Abstract from initial ArXiv print:
  
  We investigate the journal impact factor, focusing on the applied
  mathematics category. We discuss impact factor manipulation and
  demonstrate that the impact factor gives an inaccurate view of journal
  quality, which is poorly correlated with expert opinion.


As far as scientific assessments the authors in the above article are pretty negative of such rankings, and give a few examples of editors having citation practices that intentionally inflate their journals rankings.

I'm sure more literature on the topic exists than this though (so I look forward to any other suggestions).



Unfortunately the transcript from the chat is currently not linked to in the applicable thread on meta stats. But I will update here if it becomes available.