The Impact of Geographical Journals: A Look at the ISI DataAuthor(s): J. W. R. WhitehandSource: Area, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Jun., 1984), pp. 185-187Published by: The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20002055 .

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Area (1984) 16.2, 185-187

The impact of geographical journals: a look at the ISI data

J W R Whitehand, University of Birmingham

Summary Major geographical journals are ranked according to their impact as measured by the Insti tute for Scientific Information for the years 1978-82. The top-ranking general geography journals are those of the AAG and the IBG, together with Geographical Analysis and the Geographical Review, but certain specialised and interdisciplinary journals are also having a considerable impact.

The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) has compiled a remarkable quantity of information about the citations contained in journals in the sciences and social sciences for periods from the 1960s onwards, and for a more recent period in journals in the arts and humanities. The number of geographical journals from which information has been abstracted has gradually increased and most of the major journals are now included in the Citation Indexes published regularly by the ISI. Most of the geographi cal journals covered are included in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and the availability from 1978 of the annual SSCI journal Citation Reports has made it possible to undertake a variety of analyses of the relationships between these and other journals.

Most geographers have neither the time nor the inclination to study these massive volumes in detail, but many are likely to be interested in a digest of some of the infor mation that they contain, and it is for them that this note is primarily intended. Those with a deeper interest will doubtless periodically consult the volumes themselves and, if sufficiently interested in the technicalities, refer to the burgeoning literature on ci tation analysis (Garfield, 1983, 58A-66A).

Most researchers seem to gain quickly an impression of the pecking order of journals in their field. One practical use to which these impressions have been put in the current financial stringency is in the culling of the periodicals to which libraries subscribe. One of the basic pieces of information available from SSCI Journal Citation Reports that can cast light on the relative importance of journals is the frequency with which they are cited. A simple enumeration of the citations received by a journal during a given period is itself a useful measure of that journal's importance. However, this is affected by the number of articles a journal publishes and the length of time it has been in existence. It is often preferable to discount these effects by dividing the number of times a journal has been cited by the number of articles it has published during a

specific period of time. This provides what the ISI terms a journal impact factor, which reflects an average citation rate per published article. Thus, the 1982 impact factor of Area of 0 815 was calculated by dividing the number of citations in 1982 of articles published in Area in 1980 and 1981 (66) by the number of articles published in Area in 1980 and 1981 (81). The citations were derived from some 6600 science, social science, arts and humanities journals covered by the ISI. The resulting index is not

without its drawbacks (Taylor, 1981). It presents the problem, for example, of deciding what constitutes an article and it favours journals containing articles that are cited quickly. Nevertheless, it is probably the best single index of journal impact that has so far been devised.

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186 The impact of geographical journals

The main geographical journals included so far in SSCI Journal Citation Reports are ranked according to their impact factors in 1982 in Table 1, which also gives rankings in the four previous years. Journals that cover the discipline as a whole have been ranked separately from those that are more specialised, and four journals covering fields cognate to geography have also been ranked separately. The ISI advises caution in making comparisons between journals, especially when they are from different disciplines.

The results are by and large not surprising. The top six general geography journals would probably appear near the top of the lists of the subjective assessments of most geographers, at least in the English-speaking world. Five of these (Geographical

Table 1 The impact of geographical journals

1982 1981 1980 1979 1978 Impact Rank Rank Rank Rank Rank

Journal factor

General geography Area 0 815 1 * * * * Geographical Analysis 0-813 2 1 2 2 4 Annals, Association American Geogr. 0 800 3 5 5 3 1 Transactions, Institute British Geogr. 0 690 4 4 3 1 3 Professional Geographer 0 687 5 2 1 6 5 Geographical Review 0 526 6 7 6 5 2 Scottish Geographical Magazine 0 471 7 14 11 8 12 Australian Geographical Studies 0 438 8 8 7 15 15 Canadian Geographer 0 359 9 6 9 4 9 Geographische Zeitschrift 0 348 10 10 12 14 10 Mitteilungen, Osterreichische Geogr. Ges. 0 273 11 3 15 13 6 Geographical Journal 0 244 12 12 4 9 7 Soviet Geography, Review & Transl. 0 183 13 15 14 7 11 Geography 0-123 14 11 10 11 8 Journal of Geography 0 116 15 13 13 12 14 Petermanns Geographische Mitt. 0 108 16 9 8 10 13

Specialised geography

Journal of Biogeography 1 127 1 2 3 2 * Economic Geography 0 891 2 1 1 4 1 Journal of Historical Geography 0-697 3t 5t 6 1 3t Earth Surface Processes & Landforms 0 579 4 4 2 3 2 Geografiska Annaler, Ser. B 0 462 5 7 5 6 5 Geografiska Annaler, Ser. A 0 418 6 6 7 5 4 Tijdschrift econ. soc. geogr. 0-393 7 3 4 6 7

Cognate fields Regional Studies 0-778 1 1 1 3 1 Environment and Planning A 0 745 2 2 2 1 * Journal of Regional Science 0-743 3 3 3 2 2 Annals of Regional Science 0 386 4 4 4 4 3

*Not available tRanking is based on a corrected impact factor supplied by the ISI: the figure in SSCI Journal Citation Reports is incorrect

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The impact of geographical journals 187

Analysis, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Professional Geographer and Geographical Review) were fairly consistently among the top six journals over the five-year period. The other general geography journals publishing large numbers of articles also maintained fairly stable rankings, with the exceptions of Soviet Geography: Review & Translation and Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen. Several of the journals publishing relatively few articles, however, show marked annual variability. This is most notable in the case of Mitteil ungen der Osterreichischen Geographischen Gesellschaft, the high 1981 ranking of which resulted largely from citations of recent works on Austria derived from an annual biblio graphy in that journal.' The figures for the small journals, therefore, should be viewed with circumspection and it would be unwise to attach much significance to their impact factors for a single year. Indeed for a variety of reasons, including unduly late receipt of issues by the ISI, aberrant values in a particular year cannot be precluded even in the case of journals publishing large numbers of articles. The inclusion of Area in

Table 1 on the basis of only one appearance in SSCI Journal Citation Reports is, how ever, an indulgence that perhaps a former editor of this journal can be allowed. If the performance of the other top-ranking general geography journals is indicative, some fairly outlandish decision-making would seem to be required by the new editor of Area for this journal not to retain its position in the 'big six ' during his term of office.

The journals dealing with subdivisions of geography are still poorly represented in the ISI's coverage, although three more have been added recently and will appear in

SSCI Journal Citation Reports in due course. These more specialised journals and the interdisciplinary journals, such as Regional Studies and Environment and Planning, A are now vying, for certain types of articles, with the top-ranking general geography journals. The rapid rise to prominence of the Journal of Biogeography is particularly noteworthy. Conversely, some of the general geography journals that played a major role in the discipline in the early part of the century would appear to be contributing

weakly both to the main body of geographical literature and that in cognate fields, an inference that is also drawn by Gatrell and Smith (1984) in their analyses of a data set compiled independently of the ISI data bases.

The contents of Table 1 are, of course, a tiny fraction of the information about geographical journals provided by the ISI's publications. Wrigley (1983) covers more of this information in his discussion of the standing of Environment and Planning A in relation to journals in similar fields, including human geography. With their improved coverage of geographical journals in recent years, the ISI's data bases are becoming an invaluable source for geographers interested in the discipline's communi cations system. What has hitherto in geography been largely confined to coffee room speculation can within the next few years be placed on a much firmer foundation at a tiny cost in man-hours compared with a few years ago.

Note 1. The ISI has a policy of not processing the references in bibliographies if there are more than 500 of

them (personal communication from S S Jones, Manager, Journal Citation Reports, 10 January 1984).

Under certain circumstances, this can have a substantial effect on the impact factor of a small journal.

References Garfield E (ed.) (1983) SSCI Journal Citation Reports (Philadelphia)

Gatrell A C and Smith A (1984) ' Networks of relations among a set of geographical journals', Prof. Geogr.

36

Taylor R (1981) ' Is the impact factor a meaningful index for the ranking of scientific research journals?',

Can. Fld Nat. 95, 236-40

Wrigley N (1983) 'The half-life of an E & P ' Environ. Plann. A 15, 571-76

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