2008 Journal impact factors

This item will be of particular interest to researchers thinking of where to submit their next paper, and for people who read journal articles on low vision.

The 2008 Journal Impact Factors have been announced. The impact factor of a medical or scientific journal relates to how many times each article is cited by other articles, on average. If a journal is full of cutting-edge research then many people will cite it, and the impact factor will be high. If no-one reads it, or if the research it contains isn’t important, it will have a low impact factor.

Very high impact factor journals tend to be the general medical and scientific journals which attract a large number of submissions (so they can be selective) and a large number of readers. Near the top of the tree are New England Journal of Medicine (impact factor: 50), Nature (31) and Science (28).

I’ve summarised below some of the journals which low vision research is published in…

Ophthalmology: 5.30 (2/41 ophthalmology journals)
Investigative Ophthalmology and Vision Science: 3.58 (4/41)
Retina: 3.48 (5/41)
Journal of Vision: 2.95 (9/41)
British Journal of Ophthalmology: 2.86 (10/41)
Eye: 2.06 (17/41)
Vision Research: 2.05 (18.41)
Optometry and Vision Science: 1.58 (22/41)
Ophthalmic & Physiological Optics: 1.00 (37/41)

Impact factor is only one measure of journal quality, and for many of us the readership is more important (if I wanted my paper to be seen by vision scientists I would rather submit to Vision Research or Journal of Vision than Ophthalmology, for example). But most of us, I suspect, send our best work to journals nearer the top of this list to start with.

Sorry if this isn’t directly interesting to those of you who read this blog from outside the science community: I will have something more clinically interesting for my next update.

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