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  2. The 2006 Impact Factors are now avaliable

The 2006 Impact Factors are now avaliable

By clock on June 20, 2007.

The 2006 Thomson Scientific Journal Citation Reports were released today. Mark Patterson reports on the PLoS journals, three of which have made it to the list for the first time, as they are too new, so their ratings are based on just a portion of the time:

The 2006 impact factors have just been released by Thompson ISI. The first two PLoS journals continue to perform very well: 14.1 for PLoS Biology (14.7 in 2006); 13.8 for PLoS Medicine (8.4 in 2006). The PLoS community-run journals also received their first impact factors: 4.9 for PLoS Computational Biology; 7.7 for PLoS Genetics; and 6.0 for PLoS Pathogens. (Note that the latter impact factors are based on only around six months worth of publications in 2005, and are likely to increase next year.)

Although the impact factor is an over-used and abused measure of scientific quality, it is a journal metric that is important for the research community, and so until there are alternatives, PLoS has to pay attention to the impact factor.

PLoS-ONE, if I am correct, should appear in the Report next year.

Also, for my circadian readers, it may be of interest how our flagship journal, Journal of Biological Rhythms fared. Here is from the e-mail from the Editor:

I'm happy to report that JBR's Impact Factor has increased! JBR's 2006 Impact Factor is 4.633, compared to 4.367 for 2005. JBR is now ranked 7/64 in the Biology category (compared to last year's 8/65) and 8/79 in the Physiology category (compared to last year's 8/75).

Update: Alex has access, so he pulled out a few more ratings for top journals.

Tags
open science
science reporting

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PLoS ONE is pretty unlikely to have a 2007 Impact Factor as it only published in the last 2 weeks of 2005. More likely its first Impact Factor will be one for 2008. Which is fine by me as it will mean that I have a whole 2 years before I have to explain why the Impact Factor of a Journal like PLoS ONE is completely irrelevant.

Hopefully by 2008 the Impact Factor as an institution will be dead and we'll have something decent in its place.