Proposal for a different ranking of anaesthesia journals.

Abstract

Bibliometric methods and particularly the impact factor (IF) [1] are the criteria according to which scientific journals are ranked in the Journal Citation Report (JCR) of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI; Philadelphia, USA). Whereas the impact of the ‘impact factor’ in the United States is unclear, the ‘impact factor’ has been thought to make a considerable impact in Western Europe [2]. In addition to the bibliometric ranking of a journal according to its IF, the JCR also classes the various journals in one or more categories. A survey of the academic staff of our department recently showed that almost all colleagues named Anaesthesiology, Anaesthesia, Anaesthesia & Analgesia and British Journal of Anaesthesia as the top journals in the category ‘Anaesthesiology’, although Pain has occupied first place since the year 2000. This discrepancy is also evident, even if only subconsciously, from current bibliometric studies in anaesthesia [3], when anaesthesiologist authors view pain journals as not ‘real’ anaesthesia journals, excluding them from analysis, even though the ISI puts them in that category. Needless to say, the impact factor has been the subject of constant criticism [2] since its introduction in the early 1960s [1], although it retains its position as the most important bibliometric parameter. The aim of our investigation was to attempt to devise a ranking method that would conform to bibliometric criteria as well as the subjective opinion of the professional reader and author. A search was run on PubMed to determine the specification of the first author of all original papers (limit item of PubMed: ‘articles with abstract’), published in 2002 in 10 top journals listed in the category ‘Anaesthesiology’ of the ISI's JCR 2002; in a second run the IF published in the JCR 2002 was multiplied by the percentage of first authors from a Department of Anaesthesiology in the journals in order to obtain a modified ranking (See Table 1). The phrases used to describe a journal, such as ‘premier journal’ and ‘top journal’ usually refer, on one hand, to a journal with a high impact factor and, on the other hand, to the category-specific ranking of a journal independent of its impact factor. For a journal to lose its top position is not without importance for authors (such as academic career progression, funding by sponsors). For authors it is a journal's prestige that induces them to submit a scientific paper [4], while for readers it is a journal's top rank that indicates the quality of its content. This can, however, be misleading for authors and readers when the top-ranking journal in a category does not have a large enough percentage of category-specific (first) authors. By including the percentage of category-specific first authors in the journal citation a new ranking is created that reflects both bibliometric calculation and reader/author assessment and which is also confirmed by the fact that this modified ranking corresponds to the JCR ranking of anaesthesia journals which was in use until 1995.