OOPS!… 1.424?

For editors and publishers alike, it is not April which is the cruellest month, but June. June is when the updated Journal Impact Factors (IF) are to be released by the Journal Citation Reports with compliments from Thomson Reuters (https://jcr.incites.thomsonreuters.com). Usually, by May, there is a lot of worrying and calculation going on behind the scenes, resulting in forebodings of an uncertain nature, often following the rule that what goes up must come down eventually. This is, of course, a psychological mechanism for preventing disappointment.

To be honest, The Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgeon team had expected an increase for 2016, but 1.424 came as something of a positive shock. When “yours truly” took over the journal in 2010, the IF had been hovering around 0.75 for a while. Parallel to the introduction of several changes, it crept up to 0.925 only to hit the (for us) magical 1.0 mark in 2013 (1.075). Since then, it had settled down nicely again at slightly below 1.0 (2015: 0.957). And now this!

The publisher is currently acquiring the necessary data to help us understand this unexpected and impressive rise. Looking at our colleagues, it was interesting to see that they all showed a relative increase: European Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery 3.759 (up from 2.803 in 2015, and from 3.304 the year before); Annals of Thoracic Surgery 3.700 (up from 3.021, but still lower than 2014's 3.849); Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery 4.446 (up from 3.494, and from 4.168 in 2014). So we all had some volatility, but overall one may fairly assume that cardiothoracic topics tend to be more cited nowadays. We editors should try to compare our individual analyses to figure out the reasons behind this effect/momentary impression.

The much-debated Impact Factor was introduced in the 1970s by Eugene Garfield (1925–2017), the founder of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), which is now owned by Thomson Reuters. The original intention was to advise librarians about which journals they should subscribe to because these journals apparently had the greatest impact on/in science—by being cited. Its ease of calculation made the IF immensely popular, unfortunately leading to its misuse or even abuse to measure and grade the scientific output of individuals. This the IF simply cannot do—just like inches are inappropriate to measure temperature. With growing awareness of this simple fact, numerous warnings were published by scientific institutions and societies, culminating in the “San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA)” which got the poor factor into a bit of disregard.

Nevertheless, the Journal Impact Factor is here to stay, not least because it is so easy to generate, its annual update has become a reliable automated process, and because there is no functioning alternative. Therefore, it will remain to be of interest primarily for publishers and editors to help them judge the performance of their journals. For the individual specialties, it also provides a scale of what is achievable. It has been generally accepted that, for instance, an IF of around 4.0 seems to be the top level for a cardiothoracic surgical journal. Although this is only approximately 10% of the value of that of the New England Journal of Medicine, it is perfectly alright for such a strongly limited medical specialty. This, by the way, is where many of the misconceptions about individual scientific achievements have crept in.

So, our IF is 1.424 now – thank you citers very much. We will not place golden embossed banners on the cover, but simply take it as an indication that we seem to be doing things relatively right. If people increase their citations it means that our authors have delivered content of higher interest than in the years before. With a bit of luck (always helpful) and your continued cooperation, we may be able to keep things and factors this way. Nevertheless, to come back to T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land once more, it may also happen that the IF will show us fear in a handful of dust in 2018.