Gauging the impact of journals

Many stakeholders, including authors, editors, librarians and funding agencies, have an interest in reliable assessments of journal impact, but the provision of this service has long been dominated by a single service, the Journal Impact Factor (JIF; Garfield, 1955) provided by the ISI and Thomson Scientific. Despite several limitations (Hecht et al., 1998; Moed et al., 1999; van Leeuwen et al., 1999; Saha et al., 2003; Dong et al., 2005; Moed, 2005; Dellavalle et al., 2007), the JIF continues to be the dominant indicator of journal performance. Recently, Hirsch’s h-index (Hirsch, 2005; Bornmann and Daniel, 2007) has been suggested as an alternative that is reliable, robust and easily computed (Braun et al., 2006; Chapron and Huste´ , 2006; van Raan, 2006; Rousseau, 2007; Schubert and Gla¨nzel, 2007; Vanclay, 2007). The h-index has been used to rank researchers (Oppenheim, 2006) and institutions (Bose, 2006; Grant et al., 2007), and offers some interesting insights into the relative ranking of forestry literature (Vanclay, in press-a).