For seven of the past 10 years, the Annual Review of Biochemistry has exhibited the highest impact of any review journal (or nonreview journal, for that matter) in the life sciences. In 1988, its impact rating stood at a towering 48.3, a figure well above the second ranking journal Pharmacological Reviews, which had a rating of 29.4. The accompanying table lists the top 10 review journals, according to their 1988 impact ratings.
Impact figures are measures of how often the average article in a particular journal is cited over a given period. The 1988 impact rating was calculated by dividing the number of citations a journal's 1986 and 1987 articles received in 1988 by the number of articles the journal published in those two years.
Journals devoted exclusively to review literature are often excluded from studies that examine high-impact periodicals. One reason, according to the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) ...
