Conservation and Ecology Impact Factors 2011

Here we go – another year, another set of citations, and another journal ranking by ISI Web of Knowledge Journal Citation Reports. Love them or loathe them, Impact Factors (IF) are immensely important for dictating publication trends. No, a high Impact Factor doesn’t mean your paper will receive hundreds of citations, but the two are correlated.

I’ve previously listed the 2008, 2009 and 2010 IF for major conservation and ecology journals – now here are the 2011 IF fresh off the press (so to speak). I’ve included the 2010 alongside to see how journals have improved or worsened (but take note – journals increase their IF on average anyway merely by the fact that publication frequency is increasing, so small jumps aren’t necessarily meaningful).

Principally ‘conservation’ journals:

• Animal Conservation: 2.931 (2011) versus 2.906 (2010)  ↑ 0.9 %
• Biodiversity and Conservation: 2.238 (2011) versus 2.146 (2010) ↑ 4.3 %
• Biological Conservation: 4.115 (2011) versus 3.498 (2010) ↑ 17.6 %
• Conservation Biology: 4.692 (2011) versus 4.894 (2010) ↓ 4.3 %
• Conservation Evidence: no Impact Factor yet
• Conservation Genetics: 1.610 (2011) versus 1.255 (2010) ↑ 28.3 %
• Conservation Letters: 4.082 (2011) versus 4.694 (2010) ↓ 15.0 %
• Diversity and Distributions: 4.830 (2011) versus 4.248 (2010) ↑ 13.7 %
• Environmental Conservation: 1.927 (2011) versus 2.000 (2010) ↓ 3.8 %
• Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment: 9.113 (2011) versus 8.820 (2010) ↑ 3.3 %
• Global Change Biology: 6.862 (2011) versus 6.346 (2010) ↑ 8.1 %
• Journal for Nature Conservation: 1.864 (2011) versus 1.545 (2010) ↑ 20.6 %
• Oryx: 1.826 (2011) versus 2.185 (2010) ↓ 19.6 %

Some ecology journals that frequently publish conservation-related material:

• Ambio: 2.025 (2011) versus 1.705 (2010) ↑
• Austral Ecology: 1.824 (2011) versus 1.820 (2010) ↑
• Biology Letters: 3.762 (2011) versus 3.651 (2010) ↑
• Biotropica: 2.229 (2011) versus 2.169 (2010) ↑
• Ecography: 4.188 (2011) versus 4.417 (2010) ↓
• Ecological Applications: 5.102 (2011) versus 4.276 (2010) ↑
• Ecology: 4.849 (2011) versus 5.073 (2010) ↓
• Ecology Letters: 17.557 (2011) versus 15.253 (2010) ↑
• Journal of Animal Ecology: 4.937 (2011) versus 4.457 (2010) ↑
• Journal of Applied Ecology: 5.045 (2011) versus 4.970 (2010) ↑
• Journal of Biogeography: 4.544 (2011) versus 4.273 (2010) ↑
• Global Ecology and Biogeography: 5.145 (2011) versus 5.273 (2010) ↓
• Marine Ecology Progress Series: 2.711 (2011) versus 2.483 (2010) ↑
• Methods in Ecology and Evolution: 5.093 (2011)
• Molecular Ecology: 5.522 (2011) versus 6.457 (2010) ↓
• Oecologia: 3.412 (2011) versus 3.517 (2010) ↓
• Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society London B: 6.401 (2011) versus 6.053 (2010) ↑
• Wildlife Research: 1.323 (2011) versus 1.205 (2010) ↑

Some more general journals that occasionally publish conservation papers:

• BioScience: 4.621 (2011) versus 5.510 (2010) ↓
• Current Biology: 9.647 (2011) versus 10.025 (2010) ↓
• Nature: 36.280 (2011) versus 36.101 (2010) ↑
• Proceedings of the Royal Society London B: 5.415 (2011) versus 5.064 (2010) ↑
• PLoS Biology: 11.452 (2011) versus 12.469 (2010) ↓
• PLoS One: 4.092 (2011) versus 4.441 (2010) ↓
• Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA: 9.681 (2011) versus 9.771 (2010) ↓
• Science: 31.201 (2011) versus 31.364 (2010) ↓
• Trends in Ecology and Evolution: 15.748 (2011) versus 14.448 (2010) ↑

Based on percentage change, the biggest relative gains among the ‘conservation’ journals were made by Conservation Genetics, Biological Conservation, Journal for Nature Conservation and Diversity and Distributions.

On an absolute IF front, most journals haven’t made many huge gains or losses. However, there are some things to note; Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment continues to climb (it now is nearly on par with Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA), and while Trends in Ecology and Evolution is holding relatively steady, Ecology Letters is speeding forward – from a publishing perspective, it is easily the top journal in ecology and shows no signs of weakening.

CJA Bradshaw