Top 20 journals in anthropology

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