There's more than one way to have an impact

Abstract

In 1990 the first flyer for the Journal of Mental Health stated that ‘‘we have no intention ofadding to the multitude of lightly thumbed, tenuously relevant and uninteresting journalsaccumulating in our libraries and on our bookshelves’’. Instead, we wanted to publish ‘‘workwhich will have a direct impact upon our daily clinical practice, which is thought-provokingand which challenges assumptions and methods in mental health’’. Our aim was to gobeyond academia and publish work that would affect the wider community and result in realchanges in clinical practice, in the way services are organized and in how society thinks aboutmental health. This surely is the ultimate goal of most scientific publishing. No matter howmuch time is spent on the basic science, and how complex the theoretical questions, theimportance of the work is eventually determined by its effect on how we live our lives.Since 1990 the word ‘‘impact’’ has been used in a rather different way. An increasinglycompetitive academic culture has ensured that university staff around the world keep theireyes firmly on the twin goals of research funding and peer reviewed publications. Publicationhas become an end point in itself—and it has to be a certain type of publication. Not onlydoes the article have to be peer-reviewed, but also it should appear in as prestigious a journalas possible, and a journal’s prestige is determined largely by how often its contents are citedin other journals. By implication, we are also taking a short cut and judging the researchitself by its citation rate, rather than by its effects on perceptions or behaviour. This is theassumption behind the Journal Citation Report (JCR), published annually by the Institutefor Scientific Information (ISI) and enthusiastically adopted by academics for its handysummary of any journal’s ‘‘impact factor’’.The ‘‘impact factor’’ is defined by the ISI as ‘‘a measure of the frequency with which the‘average article’ in a journal has been cited in a particular year’’ and is ‘‘calculated bydividing the number of current citations to articles published in the 2 previous years by thetotal number of articles published in the two previous years’’ (ISI, 1994). In their recentglossary explaining the many terms used in the JCR, the ISI suggest that ‘‘The impact factorwill help you evaluate a journal’s relative importance, especially when you compare it toothers in the same field’’ (ISI, 2000). The JCR is essentially a business tool, designed to helppublishers and editors assess the success of their journal as a product. A journal is given ahigh ‘‘impact factor’’ if the articles published in it are cited by lots of other authors writingsubsequent articles on related topics. In other words, the ‘‘impact factor’’ reflects activity