Abstract

Many stakeholders, including authors, editors, librarians and funding agencies, have an interest in reliable assessments of journal impact, but the provision of this service has long been dominated by a single service, the Journal Impact Factor (JIF; Garfield, 1955) provided by the ISI and Thomson Scientific. Despite several limitations (Hecht et al., 1998; Moed et al., 1999; van Leeuwen et al., 1999; Saha et al., 2003; Dong et al., 2005; Moed, 2005; Dellavalle et al., 2007), the JIF continues to be the dominant indicator of journal performance. Recently, Hirsch’s h-index (Hirsch, 2005; Bornmann and Daniel, 2007) has been suggested as an alternative that is reliable, robust and easily computed (Braun et al., 2006; Chapron and Huste´ , 2006; van Raan, 2006; Rousseau, 2007; Schubert and Gla¨nzel, 2007; Vanclay, 2007). The h-index has been used to rank researchers (Oppenheim, 2006) and institutions (Bose, 2006; Grant et al., 2007), and offers some interesting insights into the relative ranking of forestry literature (Vanclay, in press-a).

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Pre-print of Vanclay, JK 2008, 'Gauging the impact of journals', Forest Ecology and Management, vol. 256, no. 4, pp. 507-509.

Forest Ecology and Management journal home page available at http://www.elsevier.com/locate/foreco

Publisher's version of article available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2008.05.020