AGU Journals Improve Impact Factor

AGU journals continue to rank highly in many categories in the 2010 Journal Citation Report (JCR), which was released by Thomson Reuters on 28 June. JCR reports on several measures of journal usage, including a journal’s Eigenfactor score, its Article Influence score, its Impact Factor, and its rank within a cohort of similar journals.

According to the 2010 statistics, AGU again has outperformed its larger competitors. Four different AGU titles are ranked in the top three journals in six different cohorts. The Impact Factor of several AGU journals increased significantly over the previous year.

How to Compute the Journal Impact Factor
The Impact Factor is calculated by dividing the number of citations in the JCR year by the total number of articles published in the 2 previous years. The Eigenfactor score is based on the number of times articles from the journal published in the past 5 years have been cited in the JCR year, but it also considers which journals have contributed these citations so that highly cited journals will influence the network more than lesser cited journals. The Article Influence determines the average influence of a journal’s articles over the first five years after publication. It is calculated by dividing a journal’s Eigenfactor score by the number of articles in the journal, normalized as a fraction of all articles in all publications.

Paleoceanography is a stellar performer in several categories; since 1995, Paleoceanography has been the top-ranked Paleontology category journal (of 48 titles in 2010) for Impact Factor (4.030). It holds the top rank for Article Influence in 2010, and it is second for Eigenfactor. In the Oceanography grouping (59 journals total), Paleoceanography ranks third in Impact Factor and Article Influence and moves up to fifth in Eigenfactor, this in a category where the number of journals increased by 18%.

Reviews of Geophysics, with an Impact Factor of 9.538 (an increase of 1.517 from the
prior year’s score of 8.021) ranks second in Geochemistry and Geophysics out of a total of 77 journals in this cohort. Reviews also ranks second in Article Influence. Reviews is joined in the top 20 Impact Factors in this cohort by Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, which is ranked tenth, and by Tectonics, which is ranked twelfth.

In the Geosciences, Multidisciplinary category, which includes 165 journals, AGU
takes two of the top 10 slots and four of the top 20 slots in Impact Factor. Global Biogeochemical Cycles (GBC) moves up to fifth with an impact factor of 5.263, Paleoceanography remains eighth, Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) moves up to twelfth, and Journal of Geophysical Research (JGR) (all sections) moves up to fifteenth. AGU journals also stand out from the crowd when looking at other measures. JGR and GRL retain the top two spots in Eigenfactors, with GBC seventh
and Paleoceanography twelfth. In the Article Influence scores, fourth and fifth place
belong to GBC and Paleoceanography, with GRL ninth and JGR fourteenth. In this cohort, AGU holds 3% of the titles, publishes 23% of the articles, and garners 39% of the citations.

Water Resources Research (WRR) climbs to second place in the Water Resources group,
which has a cohort of 76 titles, 10 more than in 2009; WRR ranks second in both Article Influence and Eigenfactor. WRR ranks second in another cohort, Limnology (18 titles), where the journal is ranked first in Eigenfactor and second in Article Influence.

These rankings are one indication of the excellent quality of the journals published by AGU. The journal editors and the AGU Publications Division staff remain dedicated to continuing this level of excellence and to continually improving the quality of AGU journals.