Opportunities and challenges presented by a leap in impact factor.

W hen the multinational media and information company Thomson Reuters recently announced—somewhat later than usual—the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) for 2013, the impact factor of 1.427 represented a 38% increase for Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology, up from 1.031 for 2012 (Table 1) (1). This is a truly impressive yearly increase by any standard and the journal’s current Editor-in-Chief, Professor Nevzat Karabulut, along with the Editorial Board, deserves the highest commendation (Professor Karabulut has been at the helm of the journal since March 2011). This latest release of the JCR also shows that this journal ascended 20 steps in a single year among 121 periodicals covered in the category of “radiology, nuclear medicine and medical imaging”, now ranking 74th. Although much controversy surrounds the validity of the impact factor as a tool for reflecting the credibility of scientific journals (2), it remains a basic indicator of academic publications. An obvious potential benefit of an improved impact factor is an increased ability to attract more high-quality academic manuscripts. Once accepted, these manuscripts, in turn, are expected to bring in more citations that will further improve the impact factor. As long as using impact factor manipulations to give a distorted and false-positive image of a journal’s prestige is avoided, an editorial board’s eagerness to improve upon their journal’s impact factor is understandable. To overcome some of the problems associated with impact factors, several indicators have been proposed. One of them is the so-called SJR (SCImago Journal Rank) indicator established by SCImago Lab using Scopus data (Scopus is a bibliographic database containing abstracts and citations for academic journal articles and owned by the Anglo-Dutch publishing and information company Reed Elsevier). SCImago Journal Rank indicator expresses the average number of “weighted” citations received in that year by the documents published in the journal in the three preceding years (3). “Weighted” citations essentially mean that citations received from a higher SJR journal are worth more than citations from a source with a lower SJR. Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology fares quite well so far according to SJR indicators (Table 2) (4). Impressively, the rate of self-cites for the journal remains at a mere 6.5% (Table 3) (5). Considering the fact that some journals are being suppressed from coverage by Thomson Reuters for excessively resorting to self-citation for improving their impact factors (6), the maintenance of a low self-citation figure for Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology is especially commendable. As a sad example, Turkish Journal of Botany, which had impact factors of 1.991 and 1.600 for the years 2011 and 2012, respectively, has been suppressed for the 2013 JCR due to an abundance of self-cites (70% DOI 10.5152/dir.2014.001 Immediate Past Editor-in-Chief, Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology, Department of Radiology, Hacettepe University School of Medicine, 06100 Ankara, Turkey ( [email protected])