New Journal Impact Factors

Each year ISA publishes what is called "impact factors" for scientific journals (see Table below). The impact factor (IF) basically measures how often papers are cited that have been published in that journal during the last two years. The impact factor may not be a good guide about the importance of a paper, but I think we do, consciously or unconsciously, select where we publish our papers partly based on a journals IF. Just for fun, I assembled some of the new IFs for our favourite journals, and some others for control. The Journal of Avian Biology still comes out as top of the heap in the category ornithology, but the Auk is very close and has been so for quite some years now. Nature and Science are still around 30, Proc Roy Soc B has 4.25, JEB has 2.98, while J R Soc Interface has 3.62. The engineering journals are always much lower than the biology ones, with Exp Fluids at 1.85. At the medium level we find PloS Biology (12.68) and PNAS (9.38), which perhaps soon should get the honor of publishing some wind tunnel stuff.

Journal	Impact Factor
Phil Trans R Soc	5.556
Proc R Soc B	4.248
J Exp Biol	2.981
J R Soc Interface	3.621
TREE	11.904
Funct Ecol	3.699
Oikos	2.97
BES	2.917
MEPS	2.631
AIAA J	1.025
Exp Fluids	1.854
J Avian Biol	2.327
Auk	2.303
Wilson Bull	0.47
Nature	31.434
Science	28.103
PNAS	9.38
PLoS Biology	12.683