The same can be said of counting citations of various scholarly journals. Some journal’s papers are cited more often than others, and citation indexing easily ranks them from the most often
“quoted” to the least. Like other measurements (circulation, number of pages) numbers aren’t everything. Nonetheless, information trackers who know which journals are consistently producing articles that other people find noteworthy can quickly narrow the scope of a search in an impossibly wide thicket of data. In fact, a small core of about 200 journals out of the 80,000 published produce the majority of cited articles.
You’ll find this tracking in the Journal Citation Reports published by the Institute of Scientific Information, available wherever the
