Is Methods of Information in Medicine Now a Better Journal Than in the Years Before? An Editor's Comment on the Relationship between Impact Factors and the Quality of Publications.

The ISI recently listed the 2014 impact factor for Methods of Information in Medicine to be 2.248, which is a considerable difference to the 1.083 in 2013. This begs the questions to be asked: Did the quality of published papers in the recent years improve when compared with earlier years? And, did editorial policy changes have an influence? Many parties that participate, contribute or enable research, such as authors, readers, publishers, and decision makers at universities and funding agencies consider the variously existing impact factors (and here in particular the ISI impact factor) as an important measure for the quality of a journal and its overall standing. The reasons why impact factors continue to be one of the critical aspects for a publishing venue are manifold and the research community has debated widely their pros and cons. The core editorial team of Methods (editor, senior consulting editor, associate editors) is aware of this view. Although the author of this editorial note is, to put it politely, not much in favour of such ‘impact‘ measures, we discussed during the last years several times, whether we should change our editorial policy and whether we should focus on publications that may have a higher probability of getting frequently cited within the immediate next two years after publication. E.g. by narrowing our Journal’s scope or by primarily publishing review articles. Our discussions always lead to the following findings: a. The Journal’s scope is and shall remain broad: the methodology and scientific fundamentals of organizing, representing and analysing data, information and knowledge in biomedicine and health care. Methods was never regarded as a journal limited to the biomedical and health informatics domain. We continue to see the need to provide opportunities to communicate and discuss research within the entire scope mentioned. This comprises manuscripts from medical informatics, medical biometry (resp. biostatistics), epidemiology, and others. Sometimes and with good reasons it is difficult to place the research reported in a manuscript to a single domain – a highly appreciated characteristic of our interdisciplinary research community. We are convinced that progress in science will benefit from maintaining a broad scope. A more detailed discussion on this aspect can be found in [1] and in [2], section 4. b. The two criteria for deciding whether an article should be considered for publication in Methods include that it is within the Journal’s scope and that it meets the expectations of good scientific quality. The article should have the potential to contribute to the progress of science and eventually to have an impact on health and patient care. We try to achieve this in particular through a fair, constructive, high-quality and, as we hope, efficient review process. We are aware that some accepted manuscripts have a higher chance for getting cited and some have a lower chance. This aspect, however, does not influence our decisions on whether manuscripts can or cannot be accepted for publication in Methods.