The 2008 Impact Factors have arrived!!

Abstract

Around the middle of June all editors of scientific journals get nervous—not because the school terms are over and manuscripts will begin to flow in greater numbers, not because there are professional meetings (like IFT) that will demand specific focus and attention to the journals of the professional society, but because the impact factors (IF) will be released. This editor is no different. I wait with anticipation to see the impact factors for IFT's peer-reviewed journals, the Journal of Food Science and Comprehensive Reviews in Food Science and Food Safety. I want to see if the hard work the Scientific Editors, Associate Editors, Editorial Board members, reviewers, manuscript authors, and IFT staff have put into trying to elevate the IF has paid off. My anticipation of IF standing is not to show evidence that I really believe in impact factors as a measure of quality of a journal, but rather because I know that many institutions regard impact factor as a measure of quality of papers that are published therein, and, at least for one criterion, judge their faculty and staff on the basis of papers in high impact factor journals. So we all work for improvement in IFs even if some don't believe they are a good measure of journal quality. Well, on to the IF of IFT's journals. We have some really good news on all fronts. The 2008 impact factor for JFS improved by 19% to 1.489 and its rank improved from 37/103 in 2007 to 34/107. For CRFSFS the increase was even more remarkable. The nearly 60% increase to 3.528 for 2008 is the largest increase among the Food Science and Technology sector journals and the rank increased from 12/103 in 2007 to 3/107 in 2008. So congratulations are due all-round. Of course, we are greatly pleased about this but we promise to work even harder to continue improvement in the quality of our journals. At the beginning of February 2009, ISI's Journal Citation Report (JCR), where all the citation data are reported after calculations, introduced the 5-year Impact Factor (IF5). Although it was possible to calculate the IF5 from data that were already available, the idea behind including the calculation in the report was to blunt the argument that the traditional IF2 calculation used too short a time frame, a correction that could be overcome by using the citations from the previous 5 years rather than the previous 2 years. For CRFSFS, the IF5 could not be calculated because the journal's impact data had been generated only for 2007 and 2008. However, for JFS, the IF5 could be calculated and was 1.628 with a rank of 33/107. For 2007, the IF5 was 1.475 and rank 37/103. As evident from the data, the IF5 for JFS was larger than the IF2, indicating that the older papers were being cited. However, the rank for IF5 was not markedly different than the rank for IF2, indicating that although older papers are cited, this occurs for all the journals in the Food Science and Technology sector. Bottom line is that you now have two Impact Factors that can be misused in judging quality of an individual's papers. I stand on the principle that I have stated repeatedly in my editorials: if you want to judge the impact of an individual's research, then use the actual citation numbers for each of the papers. Having said that, however, I will continue my efforts to increase the impact factors of IFT peer-reviewed journals since my voice is only one in the wilderness.