Abstract: As our readers are aware, the impact of surgical journals may be quite broad and not readily measured by a single numerical value such as the impact factor. A more holistic view provides a broader context for evaluation of the journal and readership needs. Firstly, one can look at the number of subscriptions, secondly perhaps at the number of pages published, or certainly at the impact factor. Each year Clarivate analytics determines journal impact factors based upon data from the prior two years which include assessment of the number of times that journal articles are cited and the number of citable articles published in that journal. The July 2023 Clarivate journal index factor from the science citation index expanded (SCIE)™ and social science citation index (SSCI)™ began to include journals from arts and humanities citation index (AHCI)™, and multidisciplinary emerging sources citation index (ESCI)™. Therefore, the number of journals assessed rose from more than 3,000 to almost 9,000 journals. In addition, there was an 8% increase in gold open access journals assigned a journal impact factor. Furthermore, the journal citation reports began to display the journal impact factor with to only tenths rather thousandths as had been the case through 2022. This decrease by two decimal places was undertaken to encourage users to consider other indicators and descriptive data when comparing journals. Perhaps the largest change was that the journal impact factor began to be calculated based on the date of electronic publication rather than, as had traditionally been the case, the date of print publication. This change in analytics led to substantial decreases in the impact factors of many surgical journals. Surgery’s impact factor decreased from 4.3 to 3.8. We are, however, very fortunate that our rank within surgical journals rose from the 36th most cited journal out of 213 surgical journals in 2022 to the 32nd most cited surgical journal out of 212 surgical journals in 2023.
Publication Year: 2023
Publication Date: 2023-09-01
Language: en
Type: editorial
Indexed In: ['crossref', 'pubmed']
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