CommentaryWeighing the impact (factor) of publishing in veterinary journals
Section snippets
A look at the numbers
A journal's impact factor is published annually by Thomson Reuters in Journal Citation Reports. In 2013, impact factors ranged from 0.000 to 162.500 for the 8474 science journals in the Thomson-Reuter Web of Science database.7 The distribution of impact factors is highly skewed: the median value was approximately 1.4 and only 2 journals (CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians and the New England Journal of Medicine) had an impact factor >50. Nearly 24% of journals had an impact factor of ≤1.0
Factors that influence a journal's impact factor
The impact factor varies widely by discipline and reflects the citation practices, size, and interdisciplinary connections of the research community. Because of this it is important to use discipline-specific categories when comparing journals and impact factors (although the rationale for grouping certain journals is not always obvious). The discipline of General and Internal Medicine, for example, has about the same number of journals (n = 150) and median impact factor (1.333) as Veterinary
Impact factor does not correlate with the quality of individual articles or with readership
An impact factor reflects the citation rate and, by that measure, the general quality and prestige of a journal; a journal's impact factor does not measure or correlate with the quality of individual articles or authors. The citations a journal receives are averaged across its articles and only a few articles get cited often; many other articles—in the same journal with the same impact factor —get few or no citations.2 Similarly, journals with a low impact factor may contain high quality
Looking to the future: shifting the focus in academic evaluation
Efforts are underway to shift the focus of academic evaluation away from using a journal's impact factor to assess the scientific quality of individual articles and authors. In 2012, a group of editors and publishers established the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment: Putting Science into the Assessment of Research. Among the recommendations was “the need to eliminate the use of journal-based metrics, such as the Journal Impact Factors, in funding, appointment, and promotion
The Journal of Veterinary Cardiology
The Journal of Veterinary Cardiology will soon receive its first impact factor. What can you do to keep the impact factor in perspective while supporting your journal as an important publication for cardiovascular research in animals and animal models?
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Use the impact factor as only one of many indicators of journal quality; do not use the impact factor as a measure of the quality of individual articles or authors.
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Consider the reputation of the Journal of Veterinary Cardiology, whose editorial
Conflict of interest statement
Dr. Christopher is the coordinator of the International Association of Veterinary Editors, which receives sponsorship from Wiley and Elsevier. She co-authored Writing for Publication in Veterinary Medicine, which is published by Wiley. Dr. Christopher was Editor-in-Chief of Veterinary Clinical Pathology for 12 years and currently is Field Chief Editor for a new open-access journal, Frontiers in Veterinary Science. She is a former member and chair of the NIH National Library of Medicine
References (22)
- The Thomson Reuters Impact Factor. Thomsonreuters.com/products_services/science/free/essays/impact_factor. [accessed...
The history and meaning of the journal impact factor
JAMA
(2006)Why the impact factor of journals should not be used for evaluating research
Br Med J
(1997)The impact factor game
PLOS Med
(2006)- et al.
The outflow of academic papers from China
Learn Publ
(2011) - et al.
The hidden factors in impact factors: a perspective from Brazilian science
Front Genet
(2013) Journal citation reports
(2013)Alternatives to the journal impact factor: I3 and the top-10% (or top 25%?) of the most-highly cited papers
Scientometrics
(2012)- et al.
Geographic trends in research output and citations in veterinary medicine: insight into global research capacity, species specialization, and interdisciplinary relationships
BMC Vet Res
(2013) - et al.
Relative citation impact of various study designs in the health sciences
JAMA
(2005)
Citation analysis may severely underestimate the impact of clinical research as compared to basic research
PLOS ONE
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