{"id":1158,"date":"2014-03-12T16:25:14","date_gmt":"2014-03-12T16:25:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/all-geo.org\/volcan01010\/?p=1158"},"modified":"2014-03-12T21:52:26","modified_gmt":"2014-03-12T21:52:26","slug":"the-most-important-journals-in-volcanology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/volcan01010\/2014\/03\/the-most-important-journals-in-volcanology\/","title":{"rendered":"The most important journals in volcanology"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Journal Impact Factor (JIF; average number of citations to a paper in a journal in the first two years since it was published) <\/em>is such a poor predictor of an individual paper’s citation count that quoting it is a sign of statistical illiteracy<\/a>, yet cursory judgements about the quality of scientific papers are routinely based upon of the JIF of the journal in which they are published.\u00a0 At one end of the spectrum, this means that a paper in Nature or Science is automatically assumed to be so important that a single one on a CV can be a passport to job interviews, speaking invitations, jobs and promotions<\/a>.\u00a0 At the other, papers in discipline-specific journals can be passed over, assumed to be unimportant, despite being more useful to the group of people that actually read them<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Volcanology journals are an example of the latter; it’s a small field and, with just a few volcanologists to cite each other’s work, the JIFs of the specialist journals are quite low.\u00a0 Nevertheless, they are clearly very important to the world of volcanology.\u00a0 I wanted to find out what the most important journals in volcanology are, and if there was any correlation with the JIF.<\/p>\n

To do this, I looked at the reference list of a recent review article, How volcanoes work: A 25 year perspective<\/strong>, written by Kathy Cashman<\/a> and Steve Sparks.<\/a>\u00a0 Both authors have distinguished careers and extremely wide-ranging interests so can be trusted to give a reliable overview of the subject.\u00a0 In the paper, they “focus particularly on the physical processes that modulate magma\u00a0 accumulation in the upper crust, transport magma to the surface, and control eruptive activity<\/em>“, which is actually a huge scope.\u00a0 Volcanologists working with data from the depths of the mantle and lower crust or from orbit on satellites may feel a bit neglected, but most of physical volcanology is represented.<\/p>\n

The paper cites a whopping 364 references.\u00a0 I extracted the journal or book title from each, and with a few lines of Python<\/a> code, got counts of which were cited most.\u00a0 The number of counts is a proxy for the importance of the journal in the field of volcanology.<\/p>\n

The most important journals in volcanology<\/h3>\n

\"top20_barchart\"<\/a> The most cited journals by Cashman and Sparks are the Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research<\/em> and Bulletin of Volcanology<\/em>.\u00a0 Both are respected journals, well-read by volcanologists, so it is no surprise that they are the most important journals in the field.\u00a0 JGR<\/em> and EPSL<\/em> are next.\u00a0 Between them, these top four journals represent just under half (175\/364) of all papers cited in the review.<\/p>\n

Nature<\/em> and Geology<\/em> feature in 5th and 6th, showing that some important volcanology papers are published there, but they certainly do not dominate in the way that their JIFs would suggest.<\/p>\n

Comparison between JIF and citations in Cashman and Sparks (2013)<\/h3>\n

\"citations_vs_jif\"<\/a>Comparing the number of citations in Cashman and Sparks (CCS) with the JIF (2 year citation data from SCImago<\/a>; top 20 journals only) shows an overall lack of correlation.\u00a0 The data can be divided into three groups:<\/p>\n