Seven Chemistry Journals Carrying Lots Of Clout

Calculating the influence and prestige of a given journal in chemistry (or any other field) isn't easy. Different chemists will give different opinions, depending upon their personal perspective and experience. But analyzing the collective judgment of the chemistry community, as reflected in the journals its members most frequently cite, allows for approximations of influence. Merely tabulating total citations, however, won't do. That would give undue advantage to fat journals, which have greate

David Pendlebury

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Each year, the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) calculates the impact of more than 3,000 scientific journals. Impact is a measure of the frequency with which an article has been cited, on average, in a particular year. It is derived by dividing the total citations a journal receives in one year by the total number of papers published in that journal in the previous two years.

For example, the 3,661 papers published in 1985 and 1986 in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) received 15,808 citations in ISI's 1987 Science Citation Index. Dividing 15,808 citations by 3,661 citable items gives an impact factor of approximately 4.3 for JACS in 1987.

The accompanying chart plots the impact factors of seven high-impact and representative chemistry journals for each year from 1982 to 1987. (Review journals, the best of which typically exhibit even higher impacts, were not considered here.) JACS; Angewandte ...

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