Published in:
01-09-2016 | Healthcare Policy and Outcomes
Benchmarking the Scientific and Educational Impact of the Annals of Surgical Oncology
Authors:
Charles M. Balch, MD, FACS, V. Suzanne Klimberg, MD, Kelly M. McMasters, MD, PhD, Timothy M. Pawlik, MD, MPH, PhD, Kenneth K. Tanabe, MD, FACS, Mitchell C. Posner, MD, Deborah Whippen, BA, Mark S. Roh, MD, MMM, FACS
Published in:
Annals of Surgical Oncology
|
Issue 9/2016
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Excerpt
The impact of a medical or scientific journal is often attributed to the 2-year citation index, as well as its rank order relative to other journals in its universe of subjects. These rankings are derived from impact factors based on a system devised by the Institute for Scientific Information (now Thomson Reuters) in the 1950s. An original purpose of the journal impact factor ranking was to provide an evaluative resource to medical libraries for decision making about which journals to include in their holdings. Currently, there is an active dialogue among scientific journals about the strengths and weaknesses of the impact factor ranking system as an evaluative tool.
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7 Indeed, some journal editors have been highly critical, even to the point of suggesting abandonment of the impact factor as a journal metric.
4 Recently, the Editor of the Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences stated that “the scientific community must not rely exclusively on the impact factor of journals.”
2 One shortcoming of a journal’s impact factor is that it can be skewed by publication of an isolated, but highly cited paper. In addition, citation data do not distinguish between review articles (which usually generate a higher number of citations, including self-citations) versus original peer-reviewed scientific articles, or editorials (which are generally not counted as a source document in the denominator when calculating the impact factor, while the number of citations can be used in the numerator of the calculation of the mean citations per source article). The 2-year impact factor can also understate citations when a journal publishes high impact and highly cited articles late in the year; this is an issue of concern for the
Annals of Surgical Oncology because important papers from the annual meeting of the Society of Surgical Oncology (SSO) and the American Society of Breast Surgeons are published late in the year. Because of the perceived limitations of the traditional journal ranking system, additional evaluative tools and schemas have been used to benchmark the value of medical journals.
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