“The fantastically fast rise we have seen in the Impact Factor and other metrics is an important milestone not only for ERL as a 'go to' journal and web presence for environmental science and studies, but also for the model of online and open access publishing that ERL utilizes. This achievement recognizes the high impact of the articles that ERL has published in its short lifetime,” said Dan Kammen, editor-in-chief of ERL, Distinguished Professor of Energy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the special energy fellow for the US Secretary of State. “Because of its fast and efficient peer-review process and open-access model, the journal has quickly become well established as the perfect journal for publishing time-sensitive, high-impact articles.”
A journal's Impact Factor is a measure of the frequency with which an "average article" is cited, up to two years following publication. ERL also received an Article Influence Score of 1.597, further illustrating the high impact that papers published in ERL achieve – scores greater than one indicate that each article in the journal has above-average influence.
The journal’s four most cited publications contributing to the 2009 Impact Factor are:
Global scale climate-crop yield relationships and the impacts of recent warming
David B Lobell and Christopher B Field
Cited 40 times
Life-cycle energy and greenhouse gas emission impacts of different corn
ethanol plant types
Michael Wang, May Wu and Hong Huo
Cited 28 times
Monitoring and estimating tropical forest carbon stocks: making REDD a reality
Holly K Gibbs, Sandra Brown, John O Niles and Jonathan A Foley
Cited 27 times
Scientific reticence and sea level rise
J E Hansen
Cited 25 times
More information about ERL is available at http://erl.iop.org.