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EDITOR'S CHOICE: Trish Groves Real impact BMJ 2007; 334: 0 [Full text]

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We need Clinical Impact Factor

Mangesh Thorat, Priya M. Thorat   (21 March 2007)

Structure of impact factors are also interesting

Juan M Campanario   (27 March 2007)

We need Clinical Impact Factor 21 March 2007
Mangesh Thorat, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow Dept. of Pathology & Lab Med, IU Sch of Med, 635 Barnhill Drive, MS-A128, Indianapolis, IN 46202 USA, Priya M. Thorat Send response to journal: Re: We need Clinical Impact Factor	We fully agree with your views that current impact factor does not mean everything and how a particular journal impacts people's lives matters more. We had suggested a new CLINICAL IMPACT FACTOR sometime ago in order to overcome this discrepancy between Impact Factor and real life impact of a clinical journal. We request the medical community to re-look at our proposal. Please visit: http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=read-response&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0030291#r1227 Competing interests: None declared
Structure of impact factors are also interesting 27 March 2007
Juan M Campanario, Professor Universidad de Alcala, 28871 Alcala de Henares, Madrid (Spain) Send response to journal: Re: Structure of impact factors are also interesting	We have studied the structure of impact factors, i.e. where citations come from. Scientometrics, Vol. 69, No. 1 (2006) 37–56 Structure of the impact factor of academic journals in the field of Education and Educational Psychology: Citations from editorial board members JUAN MIGUEL CAMPANARIO, LIDIA GONZÁLEZ, CRISTINA RODRÍGUEZ We present a new approach to study the structure of the impact factor of academic journals.This new method is based on calculation of the fraction of citations that contribute to the impact factor of a given journal that come from citing documents in which at least one of the authors is a member of the cited journal’s editorial board. We studied the structure of three annual impact factors of 54 journals included in the groups “Education and Educational Research” and “Psychology, Educational” of the Social Sciences Citation Index. The percentage of citations from papers authored by editorial board members ranged from 0% to 61%. In 12 journals, for at least one of the years analysed, 50% or more of the citations that contributed to the impact factor were from documents published in the journal itself. Given that editorial board members are considered to be among the most prestigious scientists, we suggest that citations from papers authored by editorial board members should be given particular consideration. Competing interests: None declared