Immunology and Cell Biology's impact factor rises for the fourth consecutive year

Abstract

I am delighted to announce to readers that the 2009 impact factor for Immunology and Cell Biology (ICB), recently released by Thomson Reuters, is 4.200. This constitutes a 9% increase over the 2008 impact factor of 3.859 and represents the fourth year in a row that ICB has recorded a substantial increase in its impact factor. In fact, since 2005 the impact factor of ICB has increased by a remarkable 226%! When viewing ICB's performance over the past 5 years an equally spectacular change has been the increase in the ranking of ICB within the cohort of ‘Immunology’ journals. In 2005 ICB was ranked 76th of 115 ‘Immunology’ journals, whereas in 2009 the ICB ranking has jumped to 28th of 128 recognized ‘Immunology’ publications. It should be noted that this ranking is even more impressive than it appears as 10 of the 27 journals in 2009 with an impact factor higher than ICB do not publish research articles, being review-only journals. To relate the ICB ranking to other immunology journals, Clinical and Experimental Allergy (4.084), Infection and Immunity (4.205), Genes and Immunity (4.222) and Journal of Leukocyte Biology (4.403) have similar impact factors. ICB is the official journal of the Australasian Society for Immunology and, again, the ICB performance is impressive when compared with other immunology society-based journals. Thus, ICB has a much higher ranking than the Scandinavian Journal of Immunology (90th, Scandinavian Society for Immunology), Immunology (47th, British Society for Immunology) and International Immunology (45th, Japanese Society for Immunology) and is approaching the ranking of the European Journal of Immunology (24th, European Federation of Immunological Societies) and the Journal of Immunology (22nd, American Association of Immunologists). The overall performance of ICB is also excellent based on a number of other criteria not presented in the Thomson Reuters statistics. Article page views and downloads from the ICB website are running at an all time high. Even more impressive is the number of electronic Table of Content (eTOC) subscriptions, which has almost doubled in the past 12 months. However, perhaps the most important statistic is the number of research articles submitted to the journal. This number has approximately doubled since 2007. The steady rise in ICB's performance relative to other immunology journals is, I believe, due to two major factors. First, the move of the journal to the Nature Publishing Group has greatly increased the visibility of the journal via the nature.com website. Second, there have been a number of Editorial changes that have increased the impact of ICB, particularly the introduction of new manuscript categories. ‘News and Commentaries’ articles were introduced in January 2007 and are based on the Nature ‘News and Views’ format. They have proven to be extremely popular, with over 70 being published so far. Even more important is the introduction of ‘Outstanding Observation’ articles, which are aimed at attracting manuscripts that describe striking observations in immunology that have extremely important conceptual implications but do not delineate molecular mechanisms. I have been very impressed by the high scientific standard of the articles that the journal has received in this category and encourage readers to view these articles, which are freely available on the ICB website. In addition I encourage all ICB readers to consider contributing high-class research articles in this category to ICB. It is this article category that, I believe, will eventually elevate ICB to being an immunology journal of even greater impact.