The table above lists the top 20 journals in anthropology by citation impact for the period 1 January 2001 to 28 February 2011. These journals range in focus from general to subfield-specific, including physical, social and cultural anthropology, as well as archaeology. All rank in the top 50 per cent of social sciences journals indexed by the Thomson Reuters Essential Science Indicators database according to citations received during the period. The average for social science journals over this time was 4.37.
Thomson Reuters identified 223 highly cited papers in anthropology. Highly cited papers rank in the top 1 per cent by citations received according to their year of publication and field.
The top five publishing these influential papers were: Journal of Human Evolution (50 papers); Current Anthropology (28); Journal of Archaeological Science (22); Evolutionary Anthropology (12); and the Annual Review of Anthropology (11).
The multidisciplinary journals Nature (20), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (19) and Science (13) also published highly cited papers in anthropology.
The origins of the highly cited papers were, in national terms, the US (121), the UK (66), Germany (30), Australia (28) and France (25). The top institutions in the field were the University of Oxford (14), University College London (13), the University of Witwatersrand (13), George Washington University (12) and Harvard University (12).
For more information on Thomson Reuters Essential Science Indicators database, see http://science.thomsonreuters.com/products/esi
| Top 20 Journals in anthropology | ||||
| Data provided by Thomson Reuters from its Essential Science Indicators, January 2001-February 2011 | ||||
| Journal | Papers | Citations | Impact | |
| 1 | Yearbook of Physical Anthropology | 63 | 1,210 | 19.21 |
| 2 | Annual Review of Anthropology | 212 | 3,122 | 14.73 |
| 3 | Journal of Human Evolution | 685 | 9,314 | 13.60 |
| 4 | Evolutionary Anthropology | 224 | 2,682 | 11.97 |
| 5 | Social Networks | 211 | 1,936 | 9.18 |
| 6 | Current Anthropology | 480 | 4,367 | 9.10 |
| 7 | American Jnl of Physical Anthropology | 1,401 | 12,561 | 8.97 |
| 8 | Human Nature | 199 | 1,733 | 8.71 |
| 9 | Journal of Anthropological Archaeology | 207 | 1,546 | 7.47 |
| 10 | Cultural Anthropology | 209 | 1,544 | 7.39 |
| 11 | Human Ecology | 3 | 2,176 | 6.65 |
| 12 | Medical Anthropology Quarterly | 226 | 1,280 | 5.66 |
| %3D13 | American Anthropologist | 588 | 3,195 | 5.43 |
| %3D13 | Public Culture | 287 | 1,559 | 5.43 |
| 15 | Journal of Archaeological Science | 1,377 | 6,874 | 4.99 |
| 16 | American Ethnologist | 395 | 1,801 | 4.56 |
| 17 | Human Organization | 379 | 1,422 | 3.75 |
| 18 | Journal of Material Culture | 150 | 536 | 3.57 |
| 19 | Field Methods | 109 | 384 | 3.52 |
| 20 | Homo | 183 | 558 | 3.05 |