ISI’s new impact factors are out.  While there are lots of problems with impact factors, particularly for comparing across fields, they influence where people send their papers and the evaluation of researchers.

So it is good news to see that Ecology and Society‘s impact factor rose substantially in 2010 vs. 2009.

The 2010 impact factor was 3.310 vs. 1.735 in 2009.

However, because E&S publishes relatively few papers a year (92 in 2009, 95 in 2008, 71 in 2007) there is a lot of jumping around from year to year, and at least some of this jumping around is due to ISI undercounting citations to ES due to problems of inconsistency in the citation of  electronic journals (no page numbers).  However, despite this variation 3.3 is well above the average IF of the previous 4 years of 2.5.

Also, Global Environmental Change, another journal that publishes a substantial amount of resilience research saw its impact factor also rise to 4.918, well above the previous four year average of 3.45.

What’s nice to see also is that this rise in citations isn’t dominated by one highly cited paper, but rather a broad set of quite different cited papers:

The 3 most cited papers from 2008 and 2009 from Ecology and Society were all from 2008:

1. The Growing Importance of Social Learning in Water Resources Management and Sustainability Science by Claudia Pahl-Wostl and others.
2. Disaster Preparation and Recovery: Lessons from Research on Resilience in Human Development by Ann Masten and Jelena Obradovic, and
3. The Roles and Movements of Actors in the Deforestation of Brazilian Amazonia by Phillip Fearnside

and the 3 most cited papers from GEC were from 2009 and 2008 were

1. The story of phosphorus: Global food security and food for thought by Dana Cordell and others
2. Adaptive co-management and the paradox of learning by Derek Armitage and others, and
3. Strategies to adapt to an uncertain climate change by Stephane Hallegatte

I will more broadly look at impact trends in resilience related journals later in the summer.