The Past Speaks

Earlier this year the Times HES published a list ranking history journals by impact factor. The list was based on Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports.

Here are the top 10 journals on their list, ranked by 5-year impact factor. The chart I posted a few days ago shows the impact factor in any given year, which can clearly lead to some wild swings. (There are, obviously, advantages to using a five-year moving average).

Tina Loo shared this link with me in a comment on a post in which I spoke about the recent decline in the number of citations to articles in the journal Environmental History. The chart I posted at the time shows that the impact factor of that journal peaked in 2006, right before it moved behind a paywall.

It is striking that Environmental History is near the very top of the list. I wonder to what extent articles in this journal are being cited by historians as opposed to people in the other disciplines that intersect with environmental history.  Most articles in a more traditional history journals are read and cited mainly by other historians, or maybe by the odd political scientist.  In contrast, the articles in EH are likely to interest people in a wider range of disciplines. The reason I say this is that at least some librarians operate on the assumption that most of the users of the journal Environmental History will tend to be in geography, ecology, disaster management, and other departments. They obviously know something about who reads this journal.

Although I’m certainly no expert in the sub-discipline of environmental history, although I’ve become familiar with the journal Environmental History in the last few months, as I have planned out the reading list for a history of globalisation course.
My other observation is that the Journal of Global History (founded in 2006) isn’t on this list.   In 2010, the JGH had an impact factor of 0.625 and was ranked by Thomson Reuters as the fourth most cited history journal in the world. I strongly suspect that in a few years, the JGH‘s five-year impact factor will also be impressive. Interestingly enough, some of the most cited and most downloaded articles in the JGH archive are papers dealing with environmental-historical topics.e.g., McCook, Stuart. 2006. “Global Rust Belt: Hemileia Vastatrix and the Ecological Integration of World Coffee Production Since 1850”. Journal of Global History. 1, no. 2: 177-195.