CARDIOVASCULAR JOURNAL OF AFRICA • Vol 24, No 8, September 2013
AFRICA
295
Editorial
Article visibility: journal impact factor and availability of
full text in PubMed Central and open access
Both the impact factor of the journal and immediate full-text
availability in Pubmed Central (PMC) have featured in editorials
before.
1-3
In 2004, the editor of the
Cardiovascular Journal of
Africa
(CVJA) lamented, like so many others, the injustice of
not having an impact factor, its validity as a tool for measuring
science output, and the negative effect of a low perceived
impact in drawing attention from publications from developing
countries.
1,4
Since then, after a selection process, we have been indexed by
the Web of Science
®
(WoS) and Thomson Reuters (Philadelphia,
PA, USA), and have seen a growing impact factor. In the case of
PMC, our acceptance to this database was announced in 2012,
2
and now we are proud that it is active and full-text articles are
available dating back to 2009. The journal opted for immediate
full open access (OA), which means that full-text articles are
available on publication date for anybody with access to the
internet.
The journal impact factor (JIF)
The impact factor is one measurement of visibility of articles
in specific journals and is more appropriately called the journal
impact factor (JIF). It was originally developed by Eugene
Garfield as a help to librarians in selecting journals to which
to subscribe.
5,6
However, it acquired iconic status as a single
measure of the quality of science published in a journal and by
extension, the scientific standing of authors, affecting, among
others, grant allocation and career advancement.
The classic JIF is defined as the ratio of the number of cites
in a given year as a ratio of the number of ‘citable’ articles
published in the previous two years. Information comes from
the approximately 11 000 journals indexed by the WoS, which is
published in the Journal Citation Report
®
(JCR).
5,6
Cites, counted
in the numerator, can be from any type of article from journals
within the database, whereas only articles designated as research
or review count in the denominator.
Factors that can be correlated with the JIF have been much
researched and debated. To name but a few, the country of the
journal and its socio-economic status,
7
the field of publishing,
number or reviews versus original research articles, and the
effect of a blockbuster article.
5,6
The
New England Journal of Medicine
(NEJM) with a JIF
of 52.658 (JCR 2012) and then
Lancet
with a JIF of 39.060
(2012) are probably the world’s most read medical journals.
South Africa’s general medical journal, the
South Africa Medical
Journal
, comes in at a JIF of 1.702.
Surprisingly, the highest JIF belongs to a journal that
most readers of CVJA may not even have heard off, a clinical
oncology journal,
Cancer Journal for Clinicians
, with a JIF of
153.459 (2012). It publishes few articles, 37 in 2010 and 11, but
with 5 678 cites in 2012. It went from a JIF of 101.78 in 2011
to 153.459 in 2012, the highest jump ever recorded. This can
mostly be attributed to an extraordinary number of cites, 1 787
to one article (26% of cites).
8
From this, one can calculate a
contribution to the JIF of 39.945, which is more than the JIF of
the
Lancet
, which had 21 366 cites for 547 articles, translating
into its JIF of 39.060.
Of course, when working in the cardiovascular field, one will
not publish in a cancer journal. In the JCR field of cardiac and
cardiovascular systems, where the CVJA resides,
Circulation
is
top, with a JIF of 15.202. However, the CVJA is from Africa. Of
the 46 African countries in the JCR, a non-medical journal the
International Journal of Photoenergy
from Egypt but domiciled
in New York, has the highest JIF of 2.663. Second is the
South
African Medical Journal
, which forms part of the medical group
of 14 African journals within the JCR, with a JIF of 1.702. Of
these, the CVJA with a JIF of 0.848 ranks a close third after the
African Journal of Psychiatry
, with a JIF of 0.871. Within the 14
titles, CVJA is the only journal fromAfrica in the field of cardiac
and cardiovascular systems.
Having publications accepted in journals with a high JIF does
not necessarily reflect an interest in local problems, but often
current interest in developed economies. For example, in the
NEJM over the eight-year period from 1997 to 2004, less than
3% of published articles addressed health issues of developing
countries. Furthermore, there was a bias towards HIV/AIDS
and infective disease. Of 202 articles addressing issues of
developing countries, 135 (almost 50% HIV/AIDS related) were
about infectious disease. Only 23 were about non-communicable
disease, of which one, a book review, discussed heart disease.
9
So, in principle, it is possible that exhortation to publish in high-
impact journals, as is often the practice, may skew research to
improve visibility in the developed world.
Then there is also the excessive emphasis on a single metric,
the ‘number that’s devoured science’, the JIF.
10
Who in clinical
medicine relies on a single sign or a single test to make a
diagnosis? The astute physician usually considers a constellation
of findings and tests in coming to a diagnostic conclusion. This
should be the same in the bibliometric evaluation of science,
and in the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment,
a group of editors and publishers made a plea for a more broad-
based approach.
11
The group suggests a reduction in emphasis on the journal
impact factor and to create context by using a variety of
journal-based metrics, e.g. five-year impact factor, EigenFactor,
SCImago, h-index, editorial and publication times, all of which
are available for the CVJA. A description of these metrics, their
use and citation databases other than WoS, such as Scopus and
