Abstract
BackgroundImpact factor (IF) is a commonly used surrogate for assessing the scientific quality of journals and articles. There is growing discontent in the medical community with the use of this quality assessment tool because of its many inherent limitations. To help address such concerns, Eigenfactor (ES) and Article Influence scores (AIS) have been devised to assess scientific impact of journals. The principal aim was to compare the temporal trends in IF, ES, and AIS on the rank order of leading medical journals over time.MethodsThe 2001 to 2008 IF, ES, AIS, and number of citable items (CI) of 35 leading medical journals were collected from the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) and the http://www.eigenfactor.org databases. The journals were ranked based on the published 2008 ES, AIS, and IF scores. Temporal score trends and variations were analyzed.ResultsIn general, the AIS and IF values provided similar rank orders. Using ES values resulted in large changes in the rank orders with higher ranking being assigned to journals that publish a large volume of articles. Since 2001, the IF and AIS of most journals increased significantly; however the ES increased in only 51% of the journals in the analysis. Conversely, 26% of journals experienced a downward trend in their ES, while the rest experienced no significant changes (23%). This discordance between temporal trends in IF and ES was largely driven by temporal changes in the number of CI published by the journals.ConclusionThe rank order of medical journals changes depending on whether IF, AIS or ES is used. All of these metrics are sensitive to the number of citable items published by journals. Consumers should thus consider all of these metrics rather than just IF alone in assessing the influence and importance of medical journals in their respective disciplines.
Highlights
The impact factor (IF), which is a score calculated each year by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), is widely considered as one of the leading proxies for evaluating the quality, importance, and influence of medical journals to their respective discipline
There are several different algorithms in use, the two that have gained the most attention in recent years are Scimago Journal Rank (SJR) and Eigenfactor score (ES), both of which use an iterative weighting system to calculate a summary index that reflects both the ‘‘quality’’ and the ‘‘quantity’’ of citations received by these journals based on a PageRank algorithm [12,15]
Since ES is at least in part dependent on the number of citable items published by journals in any given year [17,18], by reducing the publication rate, it is possible for a journal to increase IF without changing its ES
Summary
Original research papers are the main ‘‘engines’’ of generating new knowledge and, by decreasing their publication rate, journals may be mitigating dissemination of scientific knowledge and curtailing scientific discourse Over time, this may increase the IF but paradoxically reduce the overall influence of these journals on the scientific community as fewer scientists and clinicians read the journal. There is growing discontent in the medical community with the use of this quality assessment tool because of its many inherent limitations To help address such concerns, Eigenfactor (ES) and Article Influence scores (AIS) have been devised to assess scientific impact of journals. The principal aim was to compare the temporal trends in IF, ES, and AIS on the rank order of leading medical journals over time
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