What are the best/most influential/most read/most overrated journals in climate science? This turns out to be quite hard to judge, as climate science these days can seemingly include everything from economics, to biochemistry, and back to psychology. Google Scholar has a list of what it thinks are the best journals in atmospheric science. Here is an updated version of what google scholar thinks of a collection of journals that cross my radar from time to time, updated from this post in 2012.

The indices seem to have increased quite a lot in the last couple of years, so people are either publishing more, or citing more. Nature Climate Change as a new journal is – as predicted – a big mover over the last couple of years. It’s heartening to see Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics strengthen its position as the leading open access journal (the arXiv is split out by subject now, none of which appear to include climate).

• h5-index is the h-index for articles published in the last 5 complete years. It is the largest number h such that h articles published in 2010-2014 have at least h citations each
• h5-median for a publication is the median number of citations for the articles that make up its h5-index.
• *Denotes open access journal

I’m not sure why Earth System Dynamics Discussions shows up, but not Earth System Dynamics. Actually, this makes sense, as I know I have a paper in ESD cite me, but this doesn’t show up on Scholar.

For another opinion on the best climate journals, you could look here.

Thanks to @mammuthus and @KellyHerid for suggesting Nature Comms.