Recent highly cited articles in the British Journal of Nutrition.

I commented in an Editorial last year on the importance for academic journals of citations and impact factors (Trayhurn, 2002). I noted that a number of articles published by the BJN over the 50þ years of our existence have been very highly cited, the article receiving most citations being that of Durnin & Rahaman (1967). This paper, which has received over 700 citations, was reproduced in the January 2003 issue of the journal as part of an occasional series of “Citation classics”. In this Editorial I would like to address the more recent history in terms of highly cited articles in the BJN, and specifically articles published in the first years of the new millennium. At the time of writing (April, 2003), interrogation of the Science Citation Index database indicates that nearly twenty articles published in the year 2000 (excluding Supplements) have been cited ten or more times, with one (Gill et al. 2000) receiving over thirty citations. Table 1 below lists the ‘top ten’ of these highly cited papers, one of which is a review article (Kritchevsky, 2000). Self-evidently, the more recent the publication year, the fewer the number of citations that are likely to be received, the time lag between publication and subsequent appearance as a citation normally being at least 6 to 9 months. Nevertheless, several articles published in 2001 have already been cited more than ten times; the most highly cited articles in that year are listed in Table 2 and in contrast to 2000 the four articles receiving the highest number of citations are each reviews. Within a given year, clearly the earlier the month of publication the more likely it is that there will be significant numbers of citations in the years immediately following – and the 2 years which succeed the year of publication encompass the time period used to define the impact factor of a journal. Importantly, several articles published last year (2002) have already been cited five or more times. Overall, these figures indicate that influential work in nutritional science, with high and immediate impact, is being consistently published by the BJN. The titles of the recent high impact articles illustrate the catholic nature of what we publish, the list containing papers on molecular genetics and the emerging area of nutritional genomics, as well as work on antioxidants, immunology, endocrinology, nutritional epidemiology, body composition and obesity. It is gratifying that the BJN is continuing to present highly cited studies across the spectrum of nutritional science – from the classical areas of the subject to the current new frontiers.