Top ten journals in neuroscience and behaviour

	Journal	Papers	Citations	Citations per paper
1	Science	793	112,215	141.51
2	Nature	850	114,500	134.71
3	Nature Reviews Neuroscience	642	56,150	87.46
4	Neuron	3,306	231,661	70.07
5	Nature Neuroscience	2,037	136,363	66.94
6	Trends in Neurosciences	944	52,145	55.24
7	Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA	3,348	182,521	54.52
8	Annals of Neurology	2,4	96,975	39.96
9	Brain	2,472	96,912	39.20
10	Journal of Neuroscience	13,313	495,821	37.24

The data above were extracted from Thomson Reuters’ Essential Science Indicators database. This database, currently covering the period January 1998 thorough December 2008, 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 Thomson Reuters’ journal-to-category field-definition scheme. Both articles tabulated and citation counts to those articles are for the period indicated. Here our ranking of journals in neuroscience and behaviour 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 neuroscience and behaviour, 141 journals are listed, meaning 282 journals in this field were surveyed. Of these 141 journals, 29 received 50,000 or more citations during the period. This ranking of the top ten should be recognised as distinctly different from Thomson Reuters’ impact factor rankings, which are presented in the Journal Citation Reports issued 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 (citations per paper). The data for the multidisciplinary journals listed – Science, Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of the USA – take into account only those articles that have been classified by Thomson Reuters as neuroscience and behaviour papers. For more information on Thomson Reuters’ Essential Science Indicators, see http://scientific.thomsonreuters.com/products/esi.