The results of the Perspectives questionnaire on readers’ reactions to the Review leave open the further question of the Review’s standing in the scholarly profession in comparison with other journals. Fortunately, statistics published by the Institute for Scientific Information, located in Philadelphia, provide this information. For many years the Institute has published comprehensive indices, widely consulted by librarians and media researchers, on the frequency with which books and articles are cited in thousands of professional journals of the sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities, and in selected periodicals and magazines that devote space to professional concerns in these fields.
In the Arts & Humanities Citation Index for 1983 (published in 1984), Eugene Garfield, chairman and president of the Institute, analyzed the statistical results of the A&HCI inquiry for 1981. “Clearly, while books predominate, journals are an increasingly important medium through which arts and humanities scholarship is communicated. Thus it is useful to examine which A&HCI journals are the most important.” Garfield’s search for the answer to this question focused on 1,185 journals in the arts and humanities. The importance of a journal was partially determined by the number of times its contents were cited by journals in the same arts and humanities group.
Garfield lists the fifty journals that were most often cited in 1981. Of the fifty, no less than twelve were in history, the most “heavily represented” of all fields. Their rankings were as follows: Past & Present (6), American Historical Review (7), Economic History Review (13), Voprosy Istorii SSSR (14), Speculum (16), William and Mary Quarterly (17), Journal of Economic History (24), Journal of the History of Ideas (27), Istoriia SSSR (34), Historia (35), Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations (39), Historia, Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte (46).
Since journals differ in the number of issues and articles they publish annually, this naturally influences the number of citations they receive in other journals. As a consequence Garfield provided yet another, more refined measure of a journal’s importance: the “impact index.” “Impact tells you,” he wrote, “how many times the average article in a journal has been cited during a particular year. It is calculated in this study by dividing the number of source articles a journal published in 1979 and 1980 into the number of citations they received in 1981.” Of the 1,185 journals in the arts and humanities index, Linguistic Inquiry had the highest impact factor (1.51), Language (another linguistic journal) was second (1.34), the AHR was third (1.02), and Philosophical Review was fourth (.97). Among the eleven other historical journals in the top fifty, the impact factor of Past & Present (.61) was a distant second to the AHR, followed by William and Mary Quarterly (.54), Historia (.42), Speculum and Journal of Economic History (.39), Economic History Review (.37), Annales (.33), Journal of the History of Ideas and Istoriia (.23), Voprosy Istorii SSSR (.15), and Historia (.03).
Since 1977 the ascent of the Review on the ranking scale of the SSCI Journal Citation Reports has been steep.
Garfield’s article was an unusual feature in the annual volumes of the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, which does not regularly publish statistics ranking the arts and humanities journals in its data base against each other. But the Institute publishes another annual index in the field of the social sciences that can be used for this purpose. Since 1977 the SSCI Journal Citation Reports have ranked all social science journals (broadly interpreted to include not only the academic social sciences but also other allied disciplines such as law, journalism, and finance). Since historical journals are included in these rankings, they offer a basis for measuring the Review’s progress vis-à-vis other historical journals under its current editor, who assumed his duties in January 1977.
The SSCI Journal Citation Reports for 1977 ranked 1,285 journals according to the number of citations they received in 1977, as derived from the Institute’s huge data base. Following the formula described above, they were also ranked according to their impact factors. The rank of the AHR in 1977, judged by its impact factor (0.469), was 433 out of 1,285 journals. It was preceded in the ranking by ten other historical journals: Explorations in Economic History (146 and 1.073), Journal of American History (278 and 0.706), Journal of Economic History (318 and 0.633), Journal of African History (320 and 0.630), Past and Present (352 and 0.568), Hispanic American Historical Review (394 and 0.520), Journal of Social History (396 and 0.518), History (399 and 0.516), William and Mary Quarterly (406 and 0.510), and History of Education Quarterly (418 and 0.488).
Since 1977 the ascent of the Review on the ranking scale of the SSCI Journal Citation Reports has been steep. In 1978 the AHR (190 and 0.944) ranked fourth among historical journals, preceded by the Journal of Family History (61 and 1.760), British Journal for the History of Science (117 and 1.233), and Past and Present (143 and 1.071). In 1979 the AHR ranked third (202 and 0.868) behind the Journal of African History (112 and 1.260) and Journal of Family History (136 and 1.075). In 1980 the AHR reached first place among all historical journals (129 and 1.080). In 1981 the Journal of Family History (162 and 1.000) again led the Review (214 and 0.841), but in 1982 the Review (78 and 1.559) was well ahead of its nearest competitor, the Journal of American History (191 and 0.952).
In 1983 the ten leading historical journals, ranked by their impact factors, were: AHR (123 and 1.310), Journal of Historical Geography (126 and 1.297), Past and Present (162 and 1.093), Journal of American History (164 and 1.075), Journal of Modern History (241 and 0.844), Journal of African History (246 and 0.833), Journal of Sport History (310 and 0.720), History Workshop (341 and 0.676), Economic History Review (362 and 0.635), and Historische Zeitschrift (373 and 0.622). The rankings for 1984 will not be published until later in 1985.
The 1983 rankings of a few other journals of interest to historians follow: Comparative Studies in Society and History (408 and 0.577), Journal of Economic History (411 and 0.576), Exj1lorations in Economic History (465 and 0.523), Histoire Sociale/Social History (553 and 0.432), Journal of American Ethnic History (596 and 0.400), Journal of Social History (640 and 0.373), Journal of Family Histo1y (715 and 0.326), Geschichte und Gesellschaft (718 and 0.325), Business History (795 and 0.273), Isis (813 and 0.265), Labor History (818 and 0.264), Journal of the History of Ideas (832 and 0.250), Journal of Urban History (886 and 0.217), Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations (1061 and 0.131), Journal of Interdisciplinary, History (1156 and 0.082). The SSCI Journal Citation Reports have evidently ceased include among the social sciences the William and Mary Quarterly, which placed well in previous years.
The number of citations its articles receive in other publications is certainly a significant indication of a journal’s importance. If such an index as that now provided by the Institute for Scientific Information had existed earlier, the Review would doubtless have often scored much better than it did in the ratings of 1977. And yet there can be no doubt that the current editors have, during the last seven years, quickly restored the official scholarly organ of the American Historical Association to a position of preeminence among historical journals published in this country and abroad.
