Climate Science related academic journals

Compiled by Jim Prall, Dec. 2008
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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 compiled this list by noting the source of the most-cited articles on climate as found through Google Scholar. I haven't ranked them in terms of impact or significance - I don't have an expert opinion on that. 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 Eigenfactor.org which has some fun interactive mind-maps of subject matter. 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 "geosciences" - linked off "physics").
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" to limit 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; this summer 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: Nature Reports Climate Change. 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.

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