Impact of Annals of Forest Science

The 2013 Impact Factors have just been published by Thomson Reuters in the Journal Citation Reports. Annals of Forest Science’s IF (2-yrs) is 1.536 and (5-yrs), it is 1.834. The journal ranks 21 among 64 journals in the category “Forestry”) and 17 based on the 5-yrs impact factor. Google scholar provides a H5 index: for Annals of Forest Science it now is 24, meaning that 24 papers published during the 5 last years were were cited more than 24 times. In this respect, AFS ranks 8 in the “Forests and Forestry” category.

These results are a deception given the number of innovations made by the Editorial Board of the journal during the last 2 years. Indeed, IF has a large inertia, and editorial changes have an impact on IF and many other metrics after several years only. Moreover, many journals in the Forestry section, and particularly those dealing with “Forest Science” or “Forest research” struggle to increase their impact, which in a vast majority of cases, remains below 2.

Annals of Forest Science will continue innovating in several aspects. The journal is now a green open access journal, given that all published items are made freely available on the HAL archive (see also the editorial on this blog). We just launched a new section devoted  to data-papers.  We defined a new scope for the journal, which is now centered on the dynamics of forest ecosystems and forest products under the ungoing change in climate, land use, management and fertility. Many more smaller innovations were undertaken to make Annals of Forest Science a modern and efficient journal to publish top results in forest and wood sciences. Last but not least, we just launched this blog that should reflect the active life of the journal.

We are looking forward to the pleasure of considering your future contribution to our journal soon!

Erwin Dreyer, Chief editor.