BMJ  2007;334:561-564 (17 March), doi:10.1136/bmj.39142.454086.AD

Feature

How impact factors changed medical publishing—and science

Cambridge

Hannah Brown investigates the use and abuse of journal rankings

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

George Lundberg spent the early 1980s lamenting the loss of his journal's once great reputation. JAMA (the Journal of the AmericanMedical Association), which he had taken over in 1982, had been in decline since its peak of popularity in the 1960s. And a new set of rankings that pitted medical journals against each other on the basis of article citations now seemed to confirm that JAMA was a long way behind the best. To make his editorship successful, Dr Lundberg needed a recovery strategy.

So, while other medical journals continued to dismiss as an irrelevance their citation rankings—labelled "impact factor" by the data crunching company that devised and compiled the system—Dr Lundberg seized the opportunity to make them work in JAMA's favour. Recognising that impact factors were derived from citations, Dr Lundberg reasoned that chasing high profile authors and institutions could help boost JAMA's rank and, . . . [Full text of this article]

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