ESC Heart Failure receives its first impact factor

Abstract

ESC Heart Failure (ESC-HF) is an open access journal of the Heart Failure Association (HFA) of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) that published its first issue in 2014, with the help of Wiley Publishing. The journal focuses on basic, clinical, and epidemiological heart failure research. Prof. Stefan D. Anker is Editor-in-Chief and Deputy Editors are Prof. Zoltán Papp (Basic Science) and Prof. Stephan von Haehling (Clinical). In the first year, ESC-HF published two issues, which further increased over time to currently six issues per year (2 in 2014, 4 in 2015/2016/2017, 6 in 2018, 6 expected in 2019). Of course, the number of articles published each year also increased during those years (16 in 2014, 39 in 2015, 38 in 2016, 92 in 2017, 147 in 2018, and 135 in the first 4 issues in 2019). In 2019 we expect to publish about 200 articles in ESC-HF, which is 12 times more than in the beginning year of the journal. We would therefore like to thank all publishing authors that have put their trust into our journal and decided to submit their work to ESC-HF for review. We would also like to thank all reviewers, statisticians, and associate editors, as well as the editorial board. Special thanks go to our editorial office – Monika Diek, Anja Janssen, and Corinna Denecke – without them it would not be possible to publish ESC-HF. Like every year, during summer Thomson Scientific published the new journal impact factors. In Europe and the USA, it is perceived as the most important measure for each journal. Not many people know how this impact factor is calculated: the number of citations of a journal X from the last 2 years are counted for the relevant year and then divided by the number of all original and review articles that were also published in the last 2 years. The formula for calculating the impact factor of journal X in 2018 is shown in Figure 1. This year, ESC-HF received its first impact factor of 3.407, which we think is a great accomplishment, reflecting the hard work everyone involved has put into the journal. If one looks at the best cited papers of the last 3 years, one can see continued interest into the published papers (Tables 1-3 1-75 according to Web of Science76). Of these articles, already 15 have been cited ≥10 times. Many of them are original articles, but also editorials, short communications and reviews are of great interest for the scientific community. In order to estimate how the impact factor of ESC-HF might develop, we compared it to the European Journal of Heart Failure (EJHF, 2018 impact factor 12.129) and European Journal of Preventive Cardiology (EJPC, 2018 impact factor 5.640). Both journals also belong to the ESC Journal Family and have continuously increased their impact factor over the last years (Figure 2). We expect that ESC-HF will equally increase its impact factor over the next years. Looking at the most cited articles of EJHF in the past 3 years, one can see that there is a very broad mix of papers that are of increased relevance to the scientific community: ESC guidelines, HFA practice guidelines, HFA position papers, trial designs, original, and review articles (Tables 4-6).77-151 In EJPC, the most cited articles in the past 3 years were predominatly original and review articles (Tables 7-9).152-226 In total, ESC-HF has published 467 articles so far, EJHF 3717 articles and EJPC 2726 articles. To further look into the best papers ever published in the three different journals, we compared the top 10 ever published papers of all three journals (Tables 10-12).1-3, 26, 27, 77-79, 152, 153, 227-246 The average number of citations of the top 10 cited papes in ESC-HF is 36.1, in EJHF 214.6, and in EJPC 167.7. The best paper so far in ESC-HF received 143 citations,226 in EJHF 624,75 and in EJPC 342.79 Therefore, one can see that all three journals are on a great path that will lead to further success. Conflict of interest: none declared. A full list of references is available at onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejhf.1665.