For those of you who follow the ISI Impact Factors for journals (the ratio of the number of total citations i+3 for the papers published in years i and i+1 divided by the total number of citable papers published in years i and i+1), you might know that the 2008 IFs have just been published. Now, whether you put stock or not in these is somewhat irrelevant – enough people do to make it relevant to who publishes what where, and who cites or does not cite scientific papers. It’s also in our scientific culture – pretty much everyone in a field will have a rough idea of the range of IFs their specific discipline’s journals span, and so it acts as a kind of target for varying qualities of science. Far from perfect, but it’s what we have to deal with.
So, I thought I’d publish the 2008 Impact Factors for the journals listed on this site’s Journals page and compare them to the 2007 values:
- Animal Conservation: 2.587 (2008) versus 2.495 (2007)
- Biodiversity and Conservation: 1.473 (2008) versus 1.421 (2007)
- Biological Conservation: 3.566 (2008) versus 3.296 (2007)
- Conservation Biology: 4.705 (2008) versus 3.934 (2007)
- Conservation Evidence: no Impact Factor yet
- Conservation Letters: not yet old enough to obtain an impact factor, but one should be ascribed within the next year or so
- Conservation Genetics: 2.408 (2008) versus 1.733 (2007)
- Diversity and Distributions: 3.466 (2008) versus 2.965 (2007)
- Environmental Conservation: 1.875 (2008) versus 1.143 (2007)
- Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment: 5.065 (2008) versus 4.269 (2007)
- Global Change Biology: 5.876 (2008) versus 4.786 (2007)
- Journal for Nature Conservation: 0.940 (2008) versus 0.837 (2007)
- Oryx: 1.381 (2008) versus 1.381 (2009)
and for some more general journals that occasionally publish conservation papers:
- Nature: 31.434 (2008) versus 28.571 (2007)
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA: 9.380 (2008) versus 9.598 (2007)
- Science: 28.103 (2008) versus 26.372 (2007)
- Trends in Ecology and Evolution: 11.904 (2008) versus 14.797 (2007)
Almost across the board, conservation journals have seen an increase in their Impact Factors. There are many other good conservation papers published in other journals, but this list probably represents the main outlets. I hope we continue to focus more on conservation outcomes rather than scientific kudos per se, although I’m certainly cognisant of the hand that feeds. Good luck with your publishing.
ConservationBytes.com 
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