T. Opthof

Netherlands Heart Journal

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POSITION STATEMENTThe impact factor of the Netherlands Heart Journal in 2013T. OpthofPublished online: 5 July 2013# The Author(s) 2013. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.comImpact factors of scientific journals divide the number ofreceived citations during a (citation) year by the number ofpapers published in the past; normally the 2 years precedingthe year of the citation count. These impact factors have -widely and for almost 20 years- been criticised when it comesto a translation of the impact factor of a journal to its constit-uent papers [1–4]. The reason is that the distribution of cita-tions over the papers of a journal is heavily skewed [2, 4].Therefore, there is a large difference between the averagenumber of citations (impact factor) and the median numberof citations. The explanation for this discrepancy is incom-plete but relates to, among other things, the number of scien-tists active in the same field. Efforts have been made to relateobtained citations to the source of citations, i.e. the citingauthors, their field, including their citation behaviour [5–8],but there is inhomogeneity in citation density below the levelof a scientific journal [9] and thus far no satisfactory solutionsfor this problem have been found. Relating citations to med-ical subject headings (MeSH) of bibliometric retrieval systemsmay be a step forward [10], but this would still depend oncategorisation of science by others than the publishing au-thors. True as this may be, it does not mean that impact factorsare not important for scientific journals, their owners, theirpublishers, their editors, their reviewers and their prospectiveauthors. The importance is also substantial for those who arein charge of judging applications for research grants andacademic positions.There has, in my opinion, never been a serious analysis onthe difference in significance between high citation numbersand, for example, high television viewing figures. Thus, fre-quent citation may mean that research is excellent, but it mayalso mean that many other scientists are interested in the sametopic (see above). The first presumption is, of course, moreattractive to frequently cited authors. But not only to authors!Editors have become active in pushing the impact factors oftheir own journals in a way that starts to overstep the boundsof reasonable ethical behaviour [11, 12]. Still, the deviation intemporal citation profile from the average profile of all otherpapers may be more indicative of scientific importance as wepresumed in a recent issue of this journal [13].The Netherlands Heart Journal received an impact factorfor the first time in its history in 2009. It was at 1.39 (withtruncation of the third decimal). The founder/owner of theInstitute for Scientific Information (at present a part of Thom-son Reuters), Eugene Garfield, has repeatedly stated that it isof course nonsense to calculate impact factors with an accu-racy of three decimals, when it concerns, in general, far lessthan 1000 published papers. This fake accuracy serves theprevention of too many ex aequo rankings amongst the morethan 8000 journals in the Journal Citation Reports, one of theyearly published products of Thomson Reuters. Figure 1shows that the impact factor of the Netherlands Heart Journalremained constant at around 1.4 between 2009 and 2011.Figure 2 shows the citation per paper in the years followingthe year of publication. At the abscissa the year of citation isgiven. Year 1 concerns the year of publication, and by divid-ing the number of citations by the number of papers publishedin the same year, one arrives at the ‘immediacy index’. Theimpact factor is calculated by averaging the citations to paperspublished in the 2 years preceding the year during whichcitations are counted. In Fig. 2 it means that for arriving atthe impact factor for 2009, one has to consider the weighedaverage of citations in year 3 for papers published in 2007 andin year 2 for papers published in 2008. At the same time, forT. Opthof (*)Department of Clinical and Experimental Cardiology, Heart FailureResearch Center, Academic Medical Center, Meibergdreef 9,Room K2-111, 1105 AZ Amsterdam, the Netherlandse-mail: t.opthof@inter.nl.netT. OpthofDepartment of Medical Physiology, University Medical CenterUtrecht, Utrecht, the NetherlandsNeth Heart J (2013) 21:319–321DOI 10.1007/s12471-013-0443-6the impact factor of 2011, one has to calculate the weighedaverage of citations in year 3 for papers published in 2009 andin year 2 for papers published in 2010 (these have beenmarked with an arrow in Fig. 2). Thus, citation during year 4and later no longer contributes to the 2-year impact factor,although citation during these years may be more frequentthan during the preceding years.The impact factor for 2012 was unknown at the time ofsubmission of this article. However, it can be deduced fromFig. 3, which shows citations obtained during 2012 to thepapers published in 2010 and 2011 and divided by the totalnumber of papers, that a minor decrease (compare with Fig. 1)is anticipated (see the thin line in Fig. 3). At the same time, bycomparing the thick with the thin line one may appreciate thatcitations obtained thus far in 2013 to the papers published in2011 and 2012 are well above the number of citationsobtained during 2012 to the papers published in 2010 and2011. The circle at week 22 has been duplicated at week 52,because it estimates the impact factor for 2013. It means thatan impact factor well above 2.00 is foreseen for the first timein the history of the Netherlands Heart Journal. Despite thelimitations of the impact factor (see above), this is good newsfor anyone interested in this journal, in particular for thosewho are considering submitting their work.Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the CreativeCommons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, andreproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and thesource are credited.References1. Seglen PO. From bad to worse: evaluation by Journal Impact.Trends Biochem Sci. 1989;14:326–7.2. Opthof T. Sense and nonsense about the impact factor. CardiovascRes. 1997;33:1–7.3. Seglen PO. Why the impact factor of journals should not be usedfor evaluating research. BMJ. 1997;314:498–502.4. Opthof T, Coronel R, Piper HM. Impact factors: no totum pro parteby skewness of citation. Cardiovasc Res. 2004;61:201–3.5. Leydesdorff L, Opthof T. Scopus’s Source Normalized Impact perPaper (SNIP) versus the Journal Impact Factor based on fractionalcounting of citations. JASIST. 2010;61:2365–9.6. Moed HF. Measuring contextual citation impact of scientificjournals. J Informetr. 2010;4:265–77.1.001.101.201.301.401.501.601.701.801.902.002009 2010 2011Impact factor Neth Heart JFig. 1 Impact factor of the Netherlands Heart Journal between 2009(first impact factor) and 2011. The impact factor of 2012 was commu-nicated between the submission of this editorial and its publication0.000.501.001.502.002.500 1 2 3 4 5 6'Impact' (citations per paper)Years since publicationCitation of Neth Heart J papers2007 papers2008 papers2009 papers2010 papers2011 papersFig. 2 Citation of the papers published by the Netherlands HeartJournal 2007–2011 during the subsequent years of citation. Year 1 isthe year of publication. Data are from Journal Citation Reports, aproduct from Thomson Reuters, when the symbols are small. The largersymbols are taken from the Web of Science (also from ThomsonReuters), in cases where information was not (yet) available in JournalCitation Reports0.00.51.01.52.02.50 4 8 12 16 20 24 28 32 36 40 44 48 52WeeksPrediction IF NHJ 2013IF 2013IF PRED 2013IF 2012Fig. 3 Prediction of the impact factor of the Netherlands Heart Journalin 2012 (thin line) and 2013 (thick line). At the time of publication ofthis article, the accuracy of this prediction can be appreciated from theofficial value, as it will have been communicated by Thomson Reuters.The impact factor for 2013 (see the circle at week 22 which is repeatedat week 52, because it predicts the situation at the end of the year) willbe officially communicated in the summer of 2014320 Neth Heart J (2013) 21:319–3217. Waltman L, Van Eck NJ, Van Leeuwen TN, et al. Some modifica-tions to the SNIP journal impact indicator. J Informetr. 2013;7:272–85.8. Leydesdorff L, Bornmann L, Mutz R, et al. Turning the tables incitation analysis one more time: Principles for comparing sets ofdocuments. JASIST. 2011;62:1370–81.9. Opthof T. Differences in citation frequency of clinical and basicscience papers in cardiovascular disease. Med Biol Eng Comput.2011;49:613–21.10. Leydesdorff L, Opthof T. Citation analysis with medical subjectheadings (MeSH) using the Web of Knowledge: a new routine.JASIST. 2013;64:1076–80.11. Wilhite AW, Fong EA. Coercive citation in academic publishing.Science. 2012;335:542–3.12. Opthof T. Inflation of impact factors by journal self-citation incardiovascular science. Neth Heart J. 2013;21:163–5.13. Opthof T, Janse MJ, Kléber AG, et al. The works of Dirk Durrer(1918–1984). Neth Heart J. 2012;20:430–3.Neth Heart J (2013) 21:319–321 321

The impact factor of the Netherlands Heart Journal in 2013

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The impact factor of the Netherlands Heart Journal in 2013

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