Every year about this time Thompson-Reuters publishes a complete listing of academic journals’ citation record over the past two years. That is to say, how much the articles in a given journal have been cited in other articles (see footnote).
I’m delighted to say that ROLSI continues to be among the top journals in our end of the social sciences, and indeed has increased its rating. We now have a citation impact score of 2.90.
We continue to be among the top journals in Linguistics (3rd out of 171 journals), Communication (3rd out of 76) and in Sociology (4th out of 142) – and, gratifyingly (to the editor, who is a social psychologist) in the Social Psychology list we are 8th out of 62. Here are the tops of the tables:
The Linguistics citation impact top table
The Communication citation impact top table
The Social Psychology citation impact top table
The Sociology impact factor top table – note ROLSI not included
Note that in the Sociology table (above) Rolsi isn’t visible, as Thomson-Reuters don’t categorise it as sociology. But you can see that our score of 2.9 puts it 4th.
More data for those interested in this kind of thing.
The graph below shows the evolution of ROLSI‘s impact over the years:
Thompson-Reuter Citation Impact scores, ROLSI
Here’s a graph showing the median impact factor for the four categories of journal in our community. Half the journals in each group have a higher impact factor; half a lower one.
The more journals in a group, then, perhaps not surprisingly, the longer the tail of citations, and the lower the median point. Communication and Social Psychology journals are less numerous, and Social Psych is probably also helped by the general trend for psychology articles to use more citations. In Linguistics there are more titles that serve small communities, which inevitably means less citations – but not necessarily scholarly quality.
And here’s a table of the citation factors of those journals that I believe are the most likely to publish articles reporting research on language in interaction. Of course there will be many such articles elsewhere – but these are the sources that come to mind most immediately.
Footnote: This is how Thomson-Reuters explain the impact factor: The Impact Factor is calculated by dividing the number of citations in the [given] year by the total number of articles published in the two previous years. An Impact Factor of 1.0 means that, on average, the articles published one or two year ago have been cited one time. An Impact Factor of 2.5 means that, on average, the articles published one or two year ago have been cited two and a half times.
Research on Language and Social Interaction - Blog 