Why are journals from less-developed countries constrained to low impact factors?

E ugene Garfield's brainchild, the journal impact factor (IF), was a brilliant idea born at the dawn of the information technology revolution and has become the most widely used bibliometric tool for evaluating journals. Despite some inherent limitations and some abuse (1), it is indeed a useful and very widely used tool for comparing journals. It is an ever present concern for both authors and journals. Journals seek to raise their ranks relative to the other journals by publishing the best research submitted to them. On the other hand, authors attempt to publish their research in the most highly ranked journals they can. This editorial will focus on some issues related to making comparisons between the IFs of journals, with some emphasis on journals from less-developed nations. We plotted the recently released 2013 IF versus rank for the 149 journals in the Web of Science category of 'medicine, general and internal' (Fig. 1). Topographically, the path to higher rank starts as a long and almost flat track (a difference of about 0.02 IF points between adjacent ranks) covering about 125 journals and reaching a maximum IF of about 3. The next part of the curve, covering about 15 journals and reaching an IFof about 7, has a slope that is over 10-fold higher (about 0.24 IF points per rank difference). Thereafter, the path becomes a steep mountain climb on which sit the top seven journals. The top seven journals sit in an IF category of their own ranging from 54.4 to 13.2. These journals were launched between 1927 and 1988, except for PLOS Medicine, which was started in 2004, and Journal of Cachexia, Sarcopenia and Muscle, which was started in 2010. The PLOS venture was started following a petition by more than 34,000 scientists from 180 countries to promote worldwide free access to journal content (2) and has received several large donations, including 9 million dollars from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (3), which kicked off the PLOS publications. The generous funding and the desire of a large part of the international community to support open access publishing were probably instrumental in the rapid success of PLOS journals. Moreover, the success of the earlier PLOS journals probably set the scene for the success of those that followed. The Journal of Cachexia, Sarcopenia and Muscle of the Society on Sarcopenia, Cachexia and Wasting Disorders (4) could have benefited from the …