Phytopathology News 6(3) p.4, 1972

Most Frequently Cited Phytopathology Journals

Eugene Garfield
President
Institute for Scientific Information
____________________________

 

At the last annual meeting of The American Phytopathological Society, I had the honor to address your members on the subject of information retrieval. In the course of my remarks, I mentioned a study conducted at the Institute for Scientific Information, which showed how our Science Citation Index ® data base could be used in organizing small library collections.

From the SCI ® we have compiled a monumental Journal Citation Index , which shows citation relationships between thousands of journals. For example, the JCI shows that in the last quarter of 1969, out of approximately 1,000,000 citations, the journal Phytopathology cited the following list:

Title 
 Times 
Cited 
Phytopathology (Self-Citation) 
822 
Plant Disease Reporter 
119 
Virology 
80 
Canadian Journal of Botany 
51 
Plant Physiology 
51 
American Journal of Botany 
47 
Nature 
46 
Annals of Applied Biology 
41 
Annual Review of Phytopathology 
38 
Phytopathologische Zeitschrift 
37 
Journal of Agricultural Research 
36 
Science 
30 
Journal of Bacteriology 
22 
Journal of Biological Chemistry 
22 
Mycologia 
20 
Agronomy Journal 
19 
Journal of General Microbiology 
19 
Annual Review of Plant Physiology 
17 
Australian Journal of Biological Sciences 
15 
Transactions of the British Mycological Society 
15 
Journal of Economic Entomology 
15 
Soil Science 
15 
Crop Science 
14 
Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 
14
Annals of the Phytopathological Society of Japan 
13 
Sewage and Industrial Wastes 
12 
Biochimica Biophysica Acta 
11 
Canadian Journal of Microbiology 
11 
Canadian Journal of Plant Science 
11 
Nematologica 
11 
Botanical Review Review 
 10 
Methods in Enzymology 
 10 
All others (731 publications including books and other known journal items)   1,148 
Total
  2,842 

 
It is worth noting that not a single member of the audience at the APS meeting could guess in advance that the third most frequently cited journal in this field is Virology . It is especially noteworthy that the analysis clearly distinguishes the journal Virology from the Journal of Virology as the journal of major importance to plant disease researchers-a decision that might be very difficult to make without such data.

In contrast to the list of journals cited by Phytopathology there follows the ranked list of source journals in which it was cited:


 
Title
Times
Cited
Phytopathology (Self-Citation) 
822
Annual Review of Phytopathology 
291 
Transactions of the British Mycological Society 
46 
Canadian Journal of Botany 
42 
Mycologia
30 
Virology
28 
Annals of Applied Biology
19
 Botanical Review
18
Canadian Journal of Microbology
17
Canadian Journal of Plant Science
15
Hilgardia
14
Theoretical and Applied Genetics
14
American Potato Journal
12 
Journal of Economic Entomology
12 
Science 
10 
All others (109 journals)
 309 
Total
1,713

 
As a result of such analyses, we added Plant Disease Reporter to our SCI coverage, an oversight that is comprehensible only if one considers that at ISI we deal with thousands of journals from all fields of research.

If any of your readers know of similar studies for phytopathology literature, I would be grateful to hear from them.
 

  

Eugene Garfield, Ph.D.
President, Inst. for Sci. Information