Yesterday the ISI released their new impact factors: the second year we have been given one. And this year ours is
5.924Our impact factor, zooming ahead

(that 4 at the end is vitally important. Vitally)

This means we’re now 12th in the Ecology impact factor league tables (yes, Diversity and Distributions, we’re gunning for you next), and are still the highest BES journal. We have been asking those nice people at ISI to put us in the evolution list too (apparently having “Evolution” in the journal name isn’t enough): if we were in that list we would be 7th. This is an increase from last year, when we were 15th, with an IF of 5.093. Our 5 year impact factor is a nice round 6, and is only based on 3 years too.

Of course we are all deliriously happy about this, a pleasure only slightly mollified by the knowledge that the use of the IF is overstated: it is an interesting statistic that says something, but really shouldn’t be taken too seriously (unless it’s 5.924, in which case it is clearly very important, and any journal with a lower IF isn’t worth reading, and those above are clearly fiddling their citations in ways we can’t imagine). What it suggests is that we are comparable with the other high quality journals in the field.

We are not wedded to the impact factor, though, and as regular readers of this blog know, we are also trialling altmetrics on the papers we publish. Hopefully this will give us some more information about papers and how widely they are being read and talked about.

Of course, we couldn’t have got where we are without a lot of hard work, so Rob and I would like to thank our associate editors, authors and reviewers, without whom we wouldn’t have all these wonderful papers to be cited an average of 5.924 times. And we would also like to thank Graziella and Sam, who have kept everything running, as well as the other staff at the BES and Wiley for their support and work.