Thomson-Reuters have just released this year’s Impact Factors. The Methods in Ecology and Evolution Impact Factor is now an astounding 6.554, up from a truly dismal 5.322 last year. We now have enough years of Impact Factors to make it worthwhile drawing a graph.
This puts us ninth in Ecology, and we would be fifth in Evolutionary Biology if Thomson-Reuters thought we published stuff in Evolutionary Biology. We would also be top in Statistics and Substance Abuse if we could get ourselves into either of those categories.
These figures are, of course, wonderful for us at Methods: it shows that we are moving in the right direction,and last year’s results were just an unfortunate blip that in no way reflect our real development. And any misgivings about changes in ranks, such as those expressed by Golstein and Spegehalter, who wrote “[a]n overinterpretation of a set of rankings where there are large uncertainty intervals … can lead both to unfairness and to inefficiency and unwarranted conclusions about changes in ranks”, are obviously – obviously – not relevant to Methods in Ecology and Evolution‘s situation. Anyone who disagrees can take it up with this cape gannet:
Methods Blog 