Annual Reviews (publisher)

Annual Reviews, located in Palo Alto California, is the non-profit publisher of a collection of 46 review series in specific disciplines in science and social science. Each review series contains 12 to 40 authoritative comprehensive review articles, covering the major journal articles on a specific topic during the preceding few years. The major topics in each subject are covered every few years, and special topics appear as appropriate. The reviews are widely used in teaching and research, and serve the purposes both of current awareness and introduction to a new subject. Since in scientific literature it is customary to cite in detail the sources only since the most recent review, these periodicals are among the highest ranking journals in Impact Factor for their subjects, as shown in the publisher's table. (This does not imply that they are necessarily the most important journals in the subject; review series always rank highly because of the relatively few articles published each year and the many articles that cite them.) The reviews are written in a compact narrative style, with a minimum of descriptive text for each article covered. Many authors provide lists of summary points and future issues. The length of each review and the number of articles covered vary widely depending on both the topic and the preferences of the author. The articles are written by invitation to the authors, who are accepted authorities on the material covered.