Every June, Thomson Reuters releases the
Journal Citation Reports that present citation data and most importantly impact factors for all the journals covered by the Web of Science. My immediate impression of
this year's report is that impact factors are fairly stable in this iteration compared to last year and that the number of journals included in economics has stopped increasing. Over the last few years Thomson Reuters has doubled the number of journals covered in economics from around 160 to 320. This has doubled most impact factors as there are twice as many venues to be cited in as previously. However, in 2011 Ecological Economics has a two year impact factor of 2.713 and in 2010 its IF was 2.754. The total number of economics journals seems relatively stable:
The expansion in the number of social science journals covered clearly is a result of competition by Scopus, which started in 2004 boasting a much wider coverage of the social sciences than the Web of Science published by Thomson-Reuters.
For a primer on bibliometric indicators
click here.
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