Back on Track.

About 10 years ago the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) recognized the need for an applied informatics journal for the health sciences. In response to this need, the journal Applied Clinical Informatics (ACI) was launched in 2009 as a companion journal to Methods of Information in Medicine (MIM), both published by Schattauer (since January 1, 2017 part of Thieme), with the intention to build bridges from theory to practice and vice versa. Both journals are official journals of IMIA but with different, albeit congruent, missions. The scope of MIM includes methodology and scientific fundamentals, and is focused on theory whereas ACI focuses on informatics applied to biomedicine and health care. To study whether theory has an impact on the quality and efficiency of health care, and so on practice, congruencies and interdependencies in publications of ACI and MIM had been explored by previous and current editors in 2014 and 2015 and published in these journals respectively [1–4]. On June 7, 2016, Thomson Reuters informed Schattauer that the 2015 Impact Factors of MIM and ACI would be suppressed for one year due to ‘Citation Stacking’, the practice of cross-referencing between two journals of the same publisher. We immediately looked into this matter and identified this as an unintentional consequence of the above discussed efforts to analyze the effects of bridging between theory and practice where one of two papers from 2015 was suspected to create citation stacking. Neither MIM nor ACI were accused of creating self-citations and the editors received supporting letters by leading informatics associations like IMIA, EFMI, and GMDS. Also editorials were published by the editors [5] and by EFMI [6] explaining and analyzing the situation in more detail. As a consequence both journals remain ed absent from the Journal Citation Report (JCR) 2015 data. Coverage of the published articles in Web of Science Core Collection (WoS CC) indexes, however, remained unchanged. As both journals continued to be indexed in WoS CC, the citations of all 2015 articles were however counted to calculate each author’s h-index. The articles including their citations also continued to be available in other databases such as Scopus.