Advice to a new editor

• Dear Hermione,

Congratulations on your appointment as editor of the Journal of Amazing Medical Advances. I'm sure that you have already gathered an enthusiastic new editorial team and that you're bursting with ideas for improving the journal. The last thing that I want to do is to dampen that enthusiasm but, as someone who has played the publishing game for a while, I felt a word of warning might be useful.

You'll find, if you haven't done so already, that the first thing potential authors ask you about the journal you edit is: “What's its impact factor?” Indeed, it will usually be the only thing they ask you. If you can reply with a double digit figure, they'll immediately try to interest you in a manuscript they are writing. If you have to admit a low number, your plans to liven up the book reviews and to redesign the journal's website won't be enough to compensate. Potential authors will make an excuse and walk away. If you think I exaggerate how much notice authors take of impact factors, take a look at the trouble some journals take to make them known. The Lancet makes a feature of its impact factor on its home page. Brain's website gives its impact factor to three decimal places.

Forget most of your current plans. The redesign and book reviews can wait. You need to concentrate on raising your impact factor, and there's no time to lose. Impact factors are updated annually by Thompson Scientific, and they are derived from citations of papers published two and three years earlier. It will be 2009 before anything you've done as editor begins to have an influence.

You probably already know that the impact factor is calculated by dividing the number of citations that your journal receives by the number of citable papers that you published. Increasing the number of citations, of course, raises the impact factor. But so can reducing the number of citable papers. You should think about both approaches.

The most reliable way of increasing the number of citations is to do it yourself. It's easy to find ways of citing papers in your own journal. You can, for example, write an introductory article, under a title such as Editor's Choice, for each issue. It's not much effort to make a few banal remarks about the papers published that month and, if you flag the articles you mention with superscripts and a list of references underneath, Thompson Scientific's search engine will pick them up and count them as citations. Commissioning commentaries on papers and encouraging correspondence also helps because this too provides an opportunity for self citation. Some editors have gone so far as to ask authors of papers that they are about to accept to add papers previously published in their journal to the list of references. But I don't recommend this; it's just too obvious.

The other part of your strategy should be to reduce the denominator of citable papers. Unfortunately, Thompson Scientific doesn't publish the criteria they use to decide what constitutes a citable paper. It's not even clear if there are explicit criteria or if they are applied consistently. Nevertheless, if articles are short, lack abstracts, and don't contain too many references they probably won't be counted as citable themselves. This is why you can publish commentaries and editorials.

Don't publish case reports. I know that readers like them and find them both educational and entertaining, but they are rarely cited and they are usually counted as citable by Thompson Scientific. And try not to publish papers in areas where there is little research activity. Resist any sympathy you feel when a paper is submitted on an unfashionable condition such as deafness or itch. You may admire the researchers for tackling common, unromantic illnesses, but there aren't many scientists working on these conditions so the constituency available to cite them is too small for you to bother with.

On the other hand, if you can pull it off, it's an excellent idea to publish a paper in a well researched area that contains a serious mistake. People will seize on the error, referring to it in their own papers and writing refutations that you can publish in your correspondence columns. The trick is in ensuring that the mistake isn't so obvious that publishing the paper reflects on your competence as an editor.

Now, it's well known that, as a measure of a journal's worth, the impact factor is seriously deficient. Perhaps you'll take the view that editors ought to have better things to do than spend time and effort trying to influence such a flawed indicator. Perhaps you would rather concentrate on producing a journal that is useful to your readers instead of grinding away at stratagems to raise your position in a league table that no one but a fool would take seriously. You might even feel that journal editors as a species have been involved in a collective dereliction of duty in the way they have allowed this malignant number to dominate biomedical publishing. I do hope not. Although you'll probably produce a journal that's widely read and enjoyed, you'll never impress the sort of people who prefer a number to thinking for themselves.

I wish you the best of luck whatever you decide.

Concentrate on raising your impact factor . . . there's no time to lose