2005 Chemistry Journals Impact Factors

Below is a selected list of the ISI 2005 and 2004 impact factors for several international journals of chemistry.

The journal Impact Factor is calculated  by the Institute for Scientific Information in its annual Journal Citation Report (which includes Journal Impact Factors 2005) by dividing the number of citations in a year, by the number of citeable articles published in the preceding two years.

Wiley-VCH
In 2005 most Wiley-VCH chemistry and materials journals have increased impact. Angewandte Chemie , with its excellent Factor of 9.596, strengthens its leading position among the general chemistry journals rom 9.161 in 2004. Chemistry—A European Journal keeps advancing and has now reached 4.907 (2004: 4.517).

Advanced Synthesis & Catalysis rises to 4.632 (2004: 4.482) and remains the leader among the primary organic and organometallic chemistry journals. Similarly, ChemBioChem has risen to 3.940 (2004: 3.474) while  sister journal ChemPhysChem enjoy result of 3.607 (2004: 3.596).

Advanced Materials means excellence in its field: Its Impact Factor leaped up to 9.107 (2004: 8.079). The younger sister journal Advanced Functional Materials, showing a rising Impact Factor since its launch, has now crossed another threshold to reach a value of 6.770 (2004: 5.679)

The impact factors of European Journals of Organic is 2.548 (2004: 2.426) and European Journal of Inorganic Chemistry is at 2.514 (2004: 2.336).

Helvetica Chimica Acta impact factor decreases to 1.650 from 1.833 in 2004.

RSC
Chem Soc Rev, the RSC's general chemistry review journal,  sees its impact factor rise by 27% to 13.7 and places it amongst the most highly cited review journals.

Most RSC journals record increased impact factors:

The Analyst, 2.858 (2.78 in 2004)
Chem Soc Rev, 13.7  (10.84 in 2004)
Green Chemistry, 3.50  (+24%)
Dalton Transactions, 3,003
ChemComm, 4.43 (+10%)
Journal of Materials Chemistry, 3.69 (+36%)
Lab on a Chip, 5.3  (5.05 in 2004)
Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry, 2.5  (+32%)  
Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry received its first (partial) Impact Factor of 2.19, based on one year of citation data.


ACS
Below are the 2004 impact factors, soon to be replaced by the 2005 values...

Analytical Chemistry is #1 in total citations (59,525) and #1 in impact factor (5.450) among journals publishing 100 or more articles in 2004.

The Journal of the American Chemical Society is also #5 in impact factor (6.903).Chemical Reviews is #1 in impact factor in chemistry with 20.233. Accounts of Chemical Research is #2 with an impact factor of 13.154.

Nano Letters is ranked #4 in impact factor (8.449), an increase from 6.144 in 2003.

Five ACS journals rank in the top ten in impact factor in organic chemistry:

Organic Letters 4.195
Bioconjugate Chemistry 3.766
The Journal of Organic Chemistry 3.462
Biomacromolecules 3.299
Organometallics 3.196
The Journal of Physical Chemistry A (impact factor of 2.639) and The Journal of Physical Chemistry B (impact factor of 3.834); Chemistry of Materials records an impact factor of 4.103.

Elsevier
The 2005 IFs of the chemistry journals published by Elsevier will soon be made available.  Below are the 2004 values:

Analytical Chemistry

JOURNAL OF CHROMATOGRAPHY A - 3.359
ANALYTICA CHIMICA ACTA -  2.588
Organic Chemistry

Tetrahedron: Asymmetry – 2.386
Tetrahedron Letters – 2.484 (Tetrahedron & Tetrahedron Letters are  2 of the top 3 most cited Organic Chemistry journals are published by Elsevier with Tetrahedron Letters being the most cited chemistry Letters Journal in the World
Inorganic Chemistry

INORGANIC CHEMISTRY COMMUNICATIONS – 1.682
COORDINATION CHEMISTRY REVIEWS – 6.446
Chemical Engineering

JOURNAL OF CATALYSIS – 4.063
JOURNAL OF MEMBRANE SCIENCE – 2.108
IFs: not all that glitters is gold

You may also be interested in checking whether the impact factor is a reliable measurement of scientific quality and this post of Derek Love is best suite to answer your question.


«"Impact factors" are an attempt to quantify what everyone knows empirically: some journals are more prestigious than others.

The whole business comes from the folks at ISI (now owned by Thomson.) They had been publishing the Citation Index for years, which was (and is) a way to find out who had referenced a given paper in the scientific literature after it was published. This can be useful if you want to see if anyone's followed up or commented on an interesting paper (or if you just want to see if anyone's cited your own work.)

About ten years ago, they introduced the Impact Factor to do the same thing for scientific journals...

The publishing community - initially rather worried and skeptical, if my memory serves - has gone completely crazy over the whole idea. Now journals advertise themselves by their impact factors. "Publish here! We're a good journal, really! We have proof!" If you'd like to know what a particular journal's rating is, they'll probably shout it out if it's any good at all. A failure to mention the number, down to three decimal places, is an act that speaks for itself.

Everyone whose livelihood depends on scientific publication, though, already knows them well, since anything that can be measured will be used at performance evaluation time. IFs are a particular obsession in academic research, since publishing papers is one of those things that an aspiring tenure-seeking associate professor is expected to do. (On the priority list, it comes right after hauling down the grant money)...

The less interesting papers are getting a free impact ride, while the better ones could have presumably been playing off in a super-impact league of their own, if such a journal existed. The authors also point out that journals covering new fields with a rapidly expanding literature - much of which is also ephemeral - have necessarily inflated IFs. Does it really indicate their quality? (Well now, say the pro-impact people, isn't this just the sort of carping you'd expect from the BMJ, who live in the shadow of the more-prestigious Lancet?)

On a different level, there's plenty of room to hate the whole idea, regardless of how it's implemented. The number of citations, say such critics, is not necessarily the only (or best) measure of a paper's worth, or the worth of the journal it appears in. (As that link shows, the original papers from both Salk and Sabin on their polio vaccines are on no one's list of high citation rates.)»