Impact factor as we know it handicaps neuropsychology and neuropsychologists.

ratio between the number of citations in a given year to any item published in that journal in the previous two years and the number of research items published in the same journal in the same two years (Garfield, 2001). Several potential pitfalls of IF have been pointed out (see Discussion Forum in Cortex, issue 37, no. 4, 2001). Still IF is widely acknowledged as the standard measure for scientific quality; the higher the IF, the more prestigious the journal, and, by inference, the more prestigious are the articles published in that journal, and the authors of these articles. Intrinsic in this quality judgement should be the criterion that journals be compared within disciplines, and not across them. However, in this era of multidisciplinarity, journals which publish articles from sibling disciplines compete to intercept good quality papers. IF, as it is currently calculated, may favour some journal/disciplines and penalise others. In particular, since the two-year window places great emphasis on current research, slow-moving fields will be greatly penalized when compared to fast moving topics. These slow-moving disciplines would fare much better were the citation interval longer. Neuropsychology, a typical slow-moving discipline, is a case in point. Neuropsychology papers are published in mainstream neuropsychology journals as well as in clinical neurology journals or neuroscience journals, which however also publish articles from fast-moving disciplines (e.g., basic neuroscience, neurophysiology, molecular biology, neuroimaging). Table I shows the IF of five neuroscience journals and five neuropsychology journals (for years 2003 and 2004) selected by asking colleagues attending a European conference to name the five journals from each discipline that sprang to mind. It appears that IF is higher for the neuroscience than for the neuropsychology journals. Therefore, to avoid being penalised when their c.v. is compared with colleagues from other disciplines competing for the same positions, or to boost their research assessment exercise output, neuropsychologists would submit their best papers