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]

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Rapid Responses:

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We need Clinical Impact Factor

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