Benavent et al., Impact factor of the Spanish medical journals, Med Clin (Barc). 2004 Nov 20;123(18):697-701.

[Johannes Stegmann]

Dear all,

I would like to  mention the article

Benavent, R.A., Zurian J.C.V., Gomez M.C., Melendez, R.S., Molina, C.N.
(2004), Impact factor of the Spanish medical journals, Medicina Clinica
(Barcelona), 123 (18), 697-701.

An article published in  NEUROLOGIA 19 (6), 283-284 (2004) by the same
authors dealing with the same subject has been pointed at by Gene Garfield
on 22 Nov. 2004.

>From the abstract (the article is, unfortunately (for me), written in
Spanish), I noted that the cites given from the Spanish non-ISI journals to
those (few) Spanish journals listed in the Journal Citation Reports were
added to the cites given by all JCR journals to the Spanish journals in
question. Thus, the impact factors increase, naturally, partly considerably
(MEDICINA CLINICA: from 0.837 to 1.125), partly negligible (International
Journal of Developmental Biology: from 1.650 to 1.654, Histology and
Histopathology: from 1.859 to 1.866) (data from JCR 2001 and the abstract
of the Med.Clin. article).

One should consider, however, that the impact factors of all JCR journals
cited in non-JCR journals would increase if the cites are added. So, prior
to any comparison of a journal's impact factor raised by the way described
with the impact factors of other journals one should carefully look whether
the latter ones also received additional cites.

I don't know whether the authors did such comparisons (I do not have access
to the full text and my few spanish words would not be sufficient to read
the text). An impact factor calculation for a journal not listed in the JCR
simply by the data of the JCR calculates, of course, only a lower limit IF.

BTW, in the Web-of-Science abstract of the Med.Clin. article a severe
omission can be observed: the final sentence reads, according to WoS: "A
low impact factor of quality, merit or relevance.", and according to
PubMed: "A low impact factor is not necessarily related to lack of quality,
merit or relevance." ;)

Kind regards,

Johannes Stegmann



-------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Johannes Stegmann
Charité - University Medicine Berlin
Joint Facility of Free University and Humboldt-University
Campus Benjamin Franklin, Medical Library
12203 Berlin, Germany
johannes.stegmann at charite.de
Tel.: +49 30 8445 2035  Fax:  +49 30 8445 4454
Personal homepage:  http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~johasteg/