BMJ  2007;334 (17 March), doi:10.1136/bmj.39154.666528.43

Editor's Choice

Editor's choice

Real impact

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Here's something that affects the behaviour and even careers of many contributors to the BMJ, yet many readers couldn't care less about it. Editors fall somewhere in between. It's the impact factor, a measure of citations to articles in the journal, which is "capable of recognising some value, some quality" (doi: 10.1136/bmj.39146.545752.BE) or "worthless" (doi: 10.1136/bmj.39146.549225.BE), or has indirectly "distorted the fundamental character of journals" (doi: 10.1136/bmj.39142.454086.AD), or has yielded "a league table that no one but a fool would take seriously" (doi: 10.1136/bmj.39142.475799.AD), depending on your point of view.

Despite all of this, we're quite pleased with the BMJ's current impact factor of around 9, and we would be fools not to tell prospective authors about it. But Groucho Marx said he didn't care to belong to any club that would have him as a member, and he had a point. The BMJ . . . [Full text of this article]

CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    StumbleUpon    Technorati    What's this?

Relevant Articles

It's all about being first

Elizabeth Loder
BMJ 2007 334: 0. [Extract] [Full Text]

Indwelling stents after ureteroscopy

Colin H Wilson and David A Rix
BMJ 2007 334: 544-545. [Extract] [Full Text] [PDF]

Audit identifies the most read BMJ research papers

Susan Mayor
BMJ 2007 334: 554-555. [Extract] [Full Text] [PDF]

How impact factors changed medical publishing—and science

Hannah Brown
BMJ 2007 334: 561-564. [Extract] [Full Text] [PDF]

Should we ditch impact factors?

Gareth Williams
BMJ 2007 334: 568. [Extract] [Full Text] [PDF]

Should we ditch impact factors?

Richard Hobbs
BMJ 2007 334: 569. [Extract] [Full Text] [PDF]

Advice to a new editor

Christopher Martyn
BMJ 2007 334: 586. [Extract] [Full Text] [PDF]

Outcomes of stenting after uncomplicated ureteroscopy: systematic review and meta-analysis

Ghulam Nabi, J Cook, J N'Dow, and S McClinton
BMJ 2007 334: 572. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

Why the UK's Medical Training Application Service failed

Tony Delamothe
BMJ 2007 334: 543-544. [Extract] [Full Text] [PDF]

Rapid Responses:

Read all Rapid Responses

We need Clinical Impact Factor

Mangesh Thorat, et al.
bmj.com, 21 Mar 2007 [Full text]

Structure of impact factors are also interesting

Juan M Campanario
bmj.com, 27 Mar 2007 [Full text]

Online poll

Find out more >>