International Security Ranks First among International Relations Journals

International Security, the quarterly journal edited at the International Security Program of the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center and published by The MIT Press, ranks first for citations and impact among international relations journals, according to two prominent metrics, Impact Factor and SCImago Journal Rank.

In the 2015 Journal Citation Reports® Impact Factor rankings, International Security had the highest Impact Factor (3.275) of eighty-six journals of international relations. The Impact Factor is a widely-cited indicator of the significance of the articles published in a journal. In a given year, the Impact Factor of a journal is the average number of citations received per article published in that journal during the two preceding years. Thus the 2015 Impact Factor is the average number of times that articles published in 2013 and 2014 were cited in 2015.

International Security also ranked first for Impact Factor in 2014. The journal has ranked first (seven times) or second (four times) eleven of the past twelve years. Since 1996, International Security has ranked first for Impact Factor ten times, and second five times. It has been one of the top five international relations journals every year.

Other leading international relations journals in the Journal Citation Reports® rankings include International Organization, World Politics, and the European Journal of International Relations.

In the 2015 SCImago rankings, International Security had the highest SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) among 404 journals in the Political Science and International Relations category, which includes most well-known international relations journals. Like the Impact Factor, the SJR is based on the average number of citations per article, but also on the importance or prestige of the journal in which the citation appears.

In the SCImago Political Science and International Relations category, other high-ranking journals include International Organization, Perspectives on Politics, World Politics, and the Journal of Peace Research.

International Security offers a combination of professional and policy-relevant articles that strives to contribute to the analysis of contemporary, historical, and theoretical questions in security studies. Topics in recent issues have included nuclear proliferation, political and military dimensions of U.S.-China relations, internal conflict, and cybersecurity.

More information about International Security is available at: http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/project/58/quarterly_journal.html