Climate Science related academic journals

Compiled by Jim Prall, Dec. 2008; updated Jan. 2010, Dec. 2012, April 2014
back to lists of climate scientists index - my home page - my blog 'Green Herring'

Here is a list of academic journals which carry articles related to climate change, climate science, climate modeling and forecasting, atmospheric physics, and allied fields such as glaciology, paleo-climatology, ocean chemistry, circulation, and biogeochemical cycles.

I began compiling this list by noting the source of the most-cited articles on climate as found through Google Scholar, in the course of working up my list of most-cited authors on climate. Beyond the ordering supplied by Eigenfactor, I don't attempt to rank these journals in terms of impact or significance. This is more for general information, and to show the range of sources in which the literature is spread out. If you want info on journal impact, you might try searching on:

In the Eigenfactor map, click on a field to bring it to the center, then it displays stats on how many journals are in that field, % of all traffic, and a list of the top 10 journals in that area. Try "Physics," then "Geosciences." Drag the red slider slightly to the right to increase the degree of detail. Another nice visual is their citation patterns map and this map of citation clustering.
The Eigenfactor search page also lets you search for journals by ISI topic area. Journals with climate-related content can be found under:
The bulk of this list below are field-specific journals; some of the most widely cited articles are those that made it into the few, highly prestigious general science journals, listed first here, with their Eigenfactor (EF) ranking among all journals: I include links to the journals' online editions. Most are "paywalled," limiting access to current issues to subscribers only. However, most allow free public access to article details and abstracts, and a growing number are offering selected full-text content free to the public, such as back issues more than a certain number of months or years old; editorials and commentary essays; supplementary material compiled specifically for the web, etc. The "open access" movement has been gaining ground; in 2009 the journal Nature agreed to public access for all its articles six months after initial publication. The short delay retains an incentive for professionals and institutions to pay for subscriptions to get immediate access, but balances the public interest in open access for historical, critical and cost-contstrained scholarly access.
At least one journal has been developed as online-only from the start:
Another new journal is being published online by Wiley Interscience, with free access to everyone initially and to universities for the first two years:
As well, some publishers including the AGU are planning to move to digital-only publishing to cut production, printing and shipping costs and lower resource consumption.

The Directory of Open Access Journals now (Jan. 2013) lists 30 titles in their Meteorology and Climatology section. Check these out!

Here are the more field-specific journals, starting with the top ten in 'geosciences' as ranked in 2010 by Eigenfactor (EF) then the rest in arbitrary order:

Past climates, paleo studies

Oceanography and ocean-atmosphere interactions

Glaciology and polar studies

other