Regardless what one thinks about impact factors, they’re out now for 2011 and will no doubt have their impact on science, publication decisions and research funding. As last year, I list the 40 most highly cited journals that are listed by the web of science under “ecology” below, with their 2011 and 2010 rank, and their respective IFs.
Taking aside stochasticity in smaller journals, the trends of the last years continue to some extent, with EL gaining ground on TREE, but below the very top, there is a bit of a mixed picture. For example, the trend of BES journals improving compared to the ESA journals of the last years is broken by Ecological Monographs making a big step forward, and also the trend towards macro-topics doesn’t seem so clear to me than it used to be in the last years. Methods in Ecology and Evolution is listed for the first time, starting with an impressive IF of around 5. Note that, for some reason, ISI didn’t list Conservation Letters under Ecology any more, but its new IF is not at 4, somewhat lower than in it’s first listed year 2010. Also, as a reference: the big journals have hardly changed compared to last year, with Nature at 36, Science at 31 and PNAS at 9.7.
|
Rank ’11 (’10) |
Journal |
Publications |
IF ’11 |
IF ’10 |
|
1 (1) |
94 |
17.557 |
15.253 |
|
|
2 (2) |
74 |
15.748 |
14.448 |
|
|
3 (3) |
22 |
14.373 |
10.698 |
|
|
4 (4) |
54 |
9.113 |
8.820 |
|
|
5 (8) |
30 |
7.433 |
5.938 |
|
|
6 (7) |
178 |
7.375 |
6.153 |
|
|
7 (6) |
292 |
6.862 |
6.346 |
|
|
8 (5) |
368 |
5.522 |
6.457 |
|
|
9 (13) |
466 |
5.415 |
5.064 |
|
|
10 (36) |
5 |
5.333 |
3.077 |
|
|
10 (16) |
5 |
5.333 |
4.800 |
|
|
12 (9) |
285 |
5.146 |
5.659 |
|
|
13 (10) |
78 |
5.145 |
5.273 |
|
|
14 (24) |
262 |
5.102 |
4.276 |
|
|
15 |
76 |
5.093 |
|
|
|
16 (14) |
161 |
5.045 |
4.970 |
|
|
17 (11) |
152 |
5.044 |
5.260 |
|
|
18 (22) |
129 |
4.937 |
4.457 |
|
|
19 (12) |
230 |
4.849 |
5.073 |
|
|
20 (27) |
102 |
4.830 |
4.248 |
|
|
21 (17) |
168 |
4.725 |
4.736 |
|
|
22 (15) |
133 |
4.692 |
4.894 |
|
|
23 (20) |
154 |
4.597 |
4.569 |
|
|
24 (19) |
140 |
4.567 |
4.645 |
|
|
25 (25) |
177 |
4.544 |
4.273 |
|
|
26 (23) |
107 |
4.188 |
4.417 |
|
|
27 (32) |
346 |
4.115 |
3.498 |
|
|
28 (30) |
254 |
3.859 |
3.587 |
|
|
29 (29) |
247 |
3.762 |
3.651 |
|
|
30 (27) |
95 |
3.495 |
3.679 |
|
|
31 (31) |
311 |
3.412 |
3.517 |
|
|
32 (28) |
254 |
3.276 |
3.656 |
|
|
33 (21) |
29 |
3.208 |
4.488 |
|
|
34 (46) |
221 |
3.179 |
2.565 |
|
|
35 (51) |
255 |
3.106 |
2.203 |
|
|
36 (41) |
172 |
3.083 |
2.926 |
|
|
37 (70) |
165 |
3.062 |
1.631 |
|
|
38 (36) |
103 |
3.061 |
3.200 |
|
|
38 (34) |
207 |
3.061 |
3.393 |
|
|
40 (44) |
212 |
3.004 |
2.790 |
theoretical ecology 
Interesting that the highest journals here are review-focused journals – with the exception of Ecol Lett. Although I’ve heard some interesting stories of Ecol. Lett. editors pushing hard for review papers as a means to inflate their impact factor. I hope that’s not true, but sad if it is – should not be the primary motivation of scientific journals in my opinion. Also interesting that the Plos journals are not listed here. An artifact of ISI selection criteria?
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I think it’s an open secret that reviews are on average more highly cited than research papers, so review journals are naturally doing well, and a lot of journals (also lower ranked) are happy to accept reviews.
However, I don’t think that this is a bad thing at all – primary research is important of course, but I find that specially for ecology, where comparability is often low, where terminology is often weakly determined and methods are changing fast, it is very important to summarize what’s going on in the primary research and discuss new ideas in the form of (quantitative) reviews, syntheses, perspectives and meta-analyses. For my part, I don’t have the feeling that we are swamped with good! reviews just yet.
PLOS journals are not listed because they are not pure Ecology and Evolution journals.
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