It’s been another year of citations and now the latest list of ISI Impact Factors (2010) has come out. Regardless of how much stock you put in these (see here for a damning review), you cannot ignore their influence on publishing trends and author journal choices.
As I’ve done for 2008 and 2009, I’ve taken the liberty of providing the new IFs for some prominent conservation and ecology journals, and a few other journals occasionally publishing conservation-related material.
One particular journal deserves special attention here. Many of you might know that I was Senior Editor with Conservation Letters from 2008-2010, and I (with other editorial staff) made some predictions about where the journal’s first impact factor might be on the scale (see also here). Well, I have to say the result exceeded my expectations (although Hugh Possingham was closer to the truth in the end – bugger!). So the journal’s first 2010 impact factor (for which I take a modicum of credit ;-) is a whopping… 4.694 (3rd among all ‘conservation’ journals). Well done to all and sundry who have edited and published in the journal. My best wishes to the team that has to deal with the inevitable rush of submissions this will likely bring!
So here are the rest of the 2010 Impact Factors with the 2009 values for comparison:
- Animal Conservation: 2.906 (2010) versus 2.358 (2009) ↑
- Biodiversity and Conservation: 2.146 (2010) versus 2.066 (2009) ↑
- Biological Conservation: 3.498 (2010) versus 3.167 (2009) ↑
- Conservation Biology: 4.894 (2010) versus 4.666 (2009) ↑
- Conservation Evidence: no Impact Factor yet
- Conservation Letters: 4.694 (2010)
- Conservation Genetics: 1.255 (2010) versus 1.849 (2009) ↓
- Diversity and Distributions: 4.248 (2010) versus 4.224 (2009) ↑
- Environmental Conservation: 2.000 (2010) versus 1.541(2009) ↑
- Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment: 8.820 (2010) versus 6.922 (2009) ↑
- Global Change Biology: 6.346 (2010) versus 5.561 (2009) ↑
- Journal for Nature Conservation: 1.545 (2010) versus 0.711 (2009) ↑
- Oryx: 2.185 (2010) versus 1.693 (2009) ↑
and for some ecology journals that frequently publish conservation-related material:
- Ambio: 1.705 (2010) versus 2.486 (2009) ↓
- Austral Ecology: 1.820 (2010) versus 1.578 (2009) ↑
- Biology Letters: 3.651 (2010) versus 3.521 (2009) ↑
- Biotropica: 2.169 (2010) versus 2.270 (2009)
- Ecography: 4.417 (2010) versus 4.385 (2009) ↑
- Ecological Applications: 4.276 (2010) versus 3.672 (2009) ↑
- Ecology: 5.073 (2010) versus 4.411 (2009) ↑
- Ecology Letters: 15.253 (2010) versus 10.318 (2009) ↑
- Journal of Animal Ecology: 4.457 (2010) versus 3.714 (2009) ↑
- Journal of Applied Ecology: 4.970 (2010) versus 4.197 (2009) ↑
- Journal of Biogeography: 4.273 (2010) versus 4.087 (2009) ↑
- Global Ecology and Biogeography: 5.273 (2010) versus 5.913 (2009) ↓
- Marine Ecology Progress Series: 2.483 (2010) versus 2.519 (2009) ↓
- Molecular Ecology: 6.457 (2010) versus 5.960 (2009) ↑
- Oecologia: 3.517 (2010) versus 3.192 (2009) ↑
- Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society London B: 6.053 (2010) versus 5.117 (2009) ↑
- Wildlife Research: 1.205 (2010) versus 1.222 (2009) ↓
and for some more general journals that occasionally publish conservation papers:
- Nature: 36.101 (2010) versus 34.480 (2009) ↑
- Proceedings of the Royal Society London B: 5.064 (2010) versus 4.857 (2009) ↑
- PLoS One: 4.441 (2010) versus 4.351 (2009) ↑
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA: 9.771 (2010) versus 9.432 (2009) ↑
- Science: 31.364 (2010) versus 29.747 (2009) ↑
- Trends in Ecology and Evolution: 14.448 (2010) versus 11.564 (2009) ↑
So the big winners were Ecology Letters, Conservation Letters, Trends in Ecology and Evolution and Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.
ConservationBytes.com 
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Interesting results – but be aware of inflation rates in impact factors. Due to increases in the number of cited papers per paper, we have seen an inflation rate of 0.23 over the past 10 years in the field of ecology (Neff and Olden 2010). See http://www.fish.washington.edu/research/oldenlab/pdf/2010/BioScience_2010b.pdf
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Thanks, Julian. Yes, they all are going up on average. I was aware of your study. It’s just the big jumps (or falls) I’m most interested in.
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Congrats to Corey and the Con Let team
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How about Current Biology?
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Was 10.992, now is 10.025. Slight decline, but relatively speaking, not much change.
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