ConservationBytes.com

Quite a bit late this year, but I’ve finally put together the 2023 conservation / ecology / sustainability journal ranks based on my (published) journal-ranking method (as I’ve done every year since 2008).

After 16 years of doing this exercise, I can’t help but notice that most journals don’t do much differently from year to year. They mostly tend to publish the same number of papers, get the same number of total publications, and therefore, remain approximately in the same rank relative to others.

Some things to note: Clarivate continues to modify its algorithm, meaning that most journal Impact Factors have gone down yet again. This is somewhat irrelevant from the perspective of relative ranking, but it might piss off a few journals.

I therefore present the new 2023 ranks for: (i) 111 ecology, conservation and multidisciplinary journals, (ii) 29 open-access (i.e., you have to pay) journals from the previous category, (iii) 68 ‘ecology’ journals, (iv) 33 ‘conservation’ journals, (v) 44 ‘sustainability’ journals (with general and energy-focussed journals included), and (vi) 21 ‘marine & freshwater’ journals.

Here are the results:

As I’ve done every year for the last 15 years, I can now present the 2022 conservation / ecology / sustainability journal ranks based on my (published) journal-ranking method.

Although both the Clarivate (Impact Factor, Journal Citation Indicator, Immediacy Index) and Scopus (CiteScore, Source-Normalised Impact Per Paper, SCImago Journal Rank) values have been out for about a month or so, the Google (h5-index, h5-median) scores only came out yesterday.

This year’s also a bit weird from the perspective of the Clarivate ranks. First, Impact Factors will no longer be provided to three significant digits, but only to one (e.g., 7.2 versus 7.162). That’s not such a big deal, but it does correct for relative ranks based on false precision. However, the biggest changes are more methdological — Impact Factors now take online articles into account (in the denominator), so most journals will have a lower Impact Factor this year compared to last. In fact, of the 105 journals in the ecology/conservation/multidisciplinary category that have data for both 2021 and 2022, the 2022 Impact Factors are a median 15% lower than the 2021 values.

Another effect in play appears to have been the pandemic. The worst of the pandemic happened right during the assessment period, and I’m pretty sure this is reflected both in terms of the number of articles published (down a median of 10%) and total number of citations in the assessment period (down 7%) per journal.

But using my method, these changes a somewhat irrelevant because I calculate relative ranks, not an absolute score.

I therefore present the new 2022 ranks for: (i) 108 ecology, conservation and multidisciplinary journals, (ii) 28 open-access (i.e., you have to pay) journals from the previous category, (iii) 66 ‘ecology’ journals, (iv) 31 ‘conservation’ journals, (v) 43 ‘sustainability’ journals (with general and energy-focussed journals included), and (vi) 21 ‘marine & freshwater’ journals.

Here are the results: