Editorial: The Impact of AIDS and Behavior

Excerpt

The life of a research journal is marked by many milestones. Soliciting those first papers to publish the first issue of a journal is itself a major accomplishment. Encouraging authors to submit their work to a new journal is a huge challenge as authors are aware that many new journals never make it past their first few volumes. As a journal becomes established it usually grows in pages and an accompanying increase in publication frequency. Perhaps the most critical marker for the maturity of a journal is its inclusion in the major indexing services. And for a journal to be fully accessible to the world it must now be available online through a reliable and well structured website. AIDS and Behavior has achieved all of these milestones and this year, the journal received its first Impact Factor—the most well know metric for estimating the quality of a scientific journal. The Impact Factor is calculated on the basis of the number of times that articles from a journal are cited in the scientific literature relative to the number of articles that are published during the same two year period. …