Commentary
Weighing the impact (factor) of publishing in veterinary journals

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvc.2015.01.002Get rights and content

Abstract

The journal in which you publish your research can have a major influence on the perceived value of your work and on your ability to reach certain audiences. The impact factor, a widely used metric of journal quality and prestige, has evolved into a benchmark of quality for institutions and graduate programs and, inappropriately, as a proxy for the quality of individual authors and articles, affecting tenure, promotion, and funding decisions. As a result, despite its many limitations, publishing decisions by authors often are based solely on a journal's impact factor. This can disadvantage journals in small disciplines, such as veterinary medicine, and limit the ability of authors to reach key audiences. In this article, factors that can influence the impact factor of a journal and its applicability, including precision, citation practices, article type, editorial policies, and size of the research community will be reviewed. The value and importance of veterinary journals such as the Journal of Veterinary Cardiology for reaching relevant audiences and for helping shape disciplinary specialties and influence clinical practice will also be discussed. Lastly, the efforts underway to develop alternative measures to assess the scientific quality of individual authors and articles, such as article-level metrics, as well as institutional measures of the economic and social impact of biomedical research will be considered. Judicious use of the impact factor and the implementation of new metrics for assessing the quality and societal relevance of veterinary research articles will benefit both authors and 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?

  • 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.

  • 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

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