Top journals in mathematics based on citations per paper

	Journal	Papers	Citations	Citations per paper
1	SIAM Review	284	6,240	21.97
2	Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, Statistical Methodology	515	8,568	16.64
3	Journal of the American Statistical Association	1,244	16,841	13.54
4	Annals of Mathematics	521	6,235	11.97
5	Annals of Statistics	1,040	12,216	11.75
6	Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics	519	5,484	10.57
7	SIAM Journal on Optimization	722	6,956	9.63
8	Inventiones Mathematicae	773	7,343	9.50
9	Biometrics	1,535	14,258	9.29
10	Biometrika	869	7,411	8.53
11	SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis	1,307	10,363	7.93
12	Mathematical Programming	924	6,798	7.36
13	SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics	1,059	6,960	6.57
14	Numerische Mathematik	911	5,866	6.44
15	Mathematical Biosciences	854	5,428	6.36
16	Annals of Probability	921	5,694	6.18
17	Duke Mathematical Journal	937	5,740	6.13
18	SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization	1,1	6,460	5.73
19	Journal of Differential Equations	2,181	11,452	5.25
20	Mathematics of Computation	1,174	5,940	5.06

The data above were extracted from Thomson Reuters’ Essential Science Indicators database. This database, currently covering the period January 1998 through October 2008, surveys only journal articles (original research reports and review articles) indexed by Thomson Reuters. Articles are assigned to a category based on the journals in which they were published and Thomson Reuters’ journal-to-category field-definition scheme. Both articles tabulated and citation counts to those articles are for the period indicated. Here, our ranking of journals in mathematics is by citations per paper to reveal weighted impact. Essential Science Indicators lists journals ranked in the top 50 per cent for a field over a given period, based on total citations. In mathematics, 211 journals are listed, meaning 422 journals in this field were surveyed. Of these 211 journals, 36 received 5,000 or more citations during the period. This ranking should be recognised as distinctly different from Thomson Reuters’ impact factor rankings, which are presented in the Journal Citation Reports issued each year. The impact factor is calculated as citations in Year 3 to a journal’s contents in Years 1 and 2, divided by the number of so-called citable items (regular articles and reviews) in Years 1 and 2. Thus, the above ranking reveals longer-term impact (citations per paper). For more information on Thomson Reuters’ Essential Science Indicators, see http://scientific.thomsonreuters.com/products/esi.