The New England Journal of Medicine has lost its position as the medical journal with the highest impact factor. The impact factor, a measure of how often a journal's papers are cited, more than doubled from last year.
The surge was thanks to the COVID-19 vaccine.
Clarivate suppressed three journals for self-citation.
In the past, we have written about previous years' reports.
Given many universities’ reliance on journal rankings to judge researchers’ work as part of tenure and promotion decisions, Clarivate’s suppression of a journal — meaning denying it an Impact Factor — can have far-reaching effects. Impact Factors are based on average citations to articles in a journal over a particular period of time. Many, including us, have argued that Impact Factor is not the best way to judge research — for reasons including relative ease of gaming such metrics.
According to a press release, the journal had been the top-ranked journal in the general and internal medicine category for 45 years.
The impact factor went from 79.3 to 202.7. The impact factor went from 91.2 to 176.1.
The journal of the American Medical Association had an impact factor greater than 100 for the first time, as well as five other journals.
Three of the top ten most- cited scientific papers of the year appeared in the journal.
Phil Davis is a bibliometrics researcher and consultant. He spoke.
No discovery or invention in the history of science can come close to the effect COVID-19 papers had on the citation record in 2021. However, because the Impact Factor is so sensitive to highly cited papers, some journal scores will reach stratospheric heights this year, only to collapse next year. Unfortunately, this super-charged cycle of boom and bust is only going to fuel a greater sense of skepticism around the meaning and interpretation of the Impact Factor.
The editor-in-chief of the journal, Richard Horton, told us he didn't want to comment without more information.
The journal's media relations team did not respond to our request for comment.
Clarivates doesn't give impact factors to journals if it identifies "anomalous citation behavior" that can distort the impact factor. The number of journals suppressed by Clarivate this year was less than last year and in 2020.
There are three journals that are suppressed in the report.
We contacted the journals for comment, but haven't heard back.
Clarivate created a new type of citation behavior that could distort impact factors they call self stacking, in which the journal contains one or more documents with citations that are highly concentrated to the JIF numerator of the title itself. The first year they defined the term, they issued warnings to the journals that were self stacking citations.
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