Top 20 journals in psychiatry and psychology by citation impact

	Journal	Papers	Citations	Citations per paper
1	Archives of General Psychiatry	1,166	70,754	60.68
2	Annual Review of Psychology	245	14,775	60.31
3	Psychological Bulletin	402	23,458	58.35
4	Psychological Review	375	17,987	47.97
5	American Journal of Psychiatry	2,700	113,714	42.12
6	Trends in Cognitive Sciences	711	29,943	42.11
7	American Psychologist	494	19,563	39.60
8	Journal of Personality and Social Psychology	1,536	45,772	29.80
9	Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology	1,141	30,946	.12
10	Journal of Abnormal Psychology	750	18,326	24.43
11	Journal of Clinical Psychiatry	2,630	59,308	22.55
12	Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry	1,672	37,154	22.22
13	Child Development	1,170	25,795	22.05
14	British Journal of Psychiatry	1,685	36,925	21.91
15	Development and Psychopathology	552	11,758	21.30
16	Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines	1,056	21,487	20.35
17	Journal of Applied Psychology	1,057	20,867	19.74
18	Psychological Medicine	1,450	,801	19.17
19	Health Psychology	825	15,708	19.04
20	Psychosomatic Medicine	1,199	22,754	18.98

The data above were extracted from the Essential Science Indicators database of Thomson Reuters. This database, currently covering the period January 1999 through February 2009, 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 the journal-to-category field-definition scheme used by Thomson Reuters. Both articles tabulated and citation counts to those articles are for the period indicated. Here, our ranking of journals in psychiatry and psychology 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 psychiatry and psychology, 299 journals are listed, meaning 598 journals in this field were surveyed.

Of the 299 journals, 48 were cited 10,000 or more times during the period. This ranking of the top 20 by citation impact (citations per paper) should be recognised as distinctly different from the impact factor rankings that are presented in the Journal Citation Reports of Thomson Reuters 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.

For more information on the Essential Science Indicators of Thomson Reuters, see http://scientific.thomsonreuters.com/products/esi.