A significant achievement.

Abstract

The latest Impact Factor (IF) data for 2013 have been released by the Institute of Scientific Information. Our top two speciality journals occupy places 6 (JNM) and 8 (EJNMMI) in a very long list of journals dedicated to medical imaging as published by Thomson Reuters Web of Science (WOS) 2014. By itself, this represents a remarkable achievement for the Editors of both journals, taking into account the intense competition and the respective “market” sizes of the representative fields of interest – an achievement which for EJNMMI has been consistent, progressive, and maintained for now almost two decades. Furthermore, if one were to exclude the organdedicated journals from the top of this list, Radiology, JNM and EJNMMI would take pride of place as numbers 1, 2 and 4 among the 120 imaging journals, a magnificent outcome. This also underlines that the number of practitioners in a given medical field does not correlate with academic excellence. From this point of view, nuclear medicine, a small medical speciality, continues to lead proudly in the advancement of medical imaging science as a whole. Table 1 shows the impact factor and other relevant metrics of the nuclear medicine journals in WOS. If we consider European journals only, EJNMMI ranks first in the entire field of radiology, nuclear medicine and medical imaging, with the highest IF ever (Table 2). It is now inconceivable that modern practice can dowithout some form of advanced medical imaging. Multimodality imaging is at the forefront of this development, with SPET-CT, PET-CT and now PET-MR. Imaging provides a quantitative regional assessment of the expressed phenotype of the individual patient affected by a pathology, more relevant than ever as one sees the multiplicity of genetic variations encountered even at the level of a single cell. Averaging molecular signals via imaging explain its success as a tool for management.