Impact Factors of Journals in Sport and Exercise Science and Medicine for 2011 Will G Sportscience 15, 15-17, 2011
(sportsci.org/2011/wghif.htm)
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Update Sept 2011: International Journal of Sport Science and Coaching has just been awarded its first mpact factor, a respectable 1.1. This article represents my annual summary of the latest impact factors of journals in the disciplines of exercise and sport science and medicine. The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI, a subsidiary of Thomson Reuters) compiles the impact factors and publishes them as Journal Citation Reports each year around June-July. You will need an institutional subscription to access this and other resources at ISI Web of Knowledge. Table 1 lists the factors of our journals in alphabetical order, while the abstract summarizes changes that are color-coded in the table. The meaning of the impact factor is summarized in the legend of the table, but for an in-depth explanation and critique of the impact factor, start with an earlier article in this series. Once again there is no impact factor for the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance in ISI's report, even though this journal has qualified for inclusion for the last three years. As I have a special interest in this journal, I used ISI's database to do the calculation. In 2010 there were 98 citations in all journals to the 82 full articles published in IJSPP in 2008 and 2009. The impact factor is therefore 98/82 = 1.2, a respectable value for a specialty journal in only its sixth year. In each of these annual updates I try to introduce something new or little known about scientific publishing. Last year it was the concept of post-publication peer review, according to which practically every article gets published, and the value of the article becomes apparent from the non-anonymous comments posted and from the citations the article ultimately gets in other articles. One year on, the website of the publisher promoting this approach still does not feature any journals devoted to sports medicine or science, and I doubt whether there will ever be any. With so much material now available on line, researchers need some kind of pre-publication peer review to winnow out the chaff of studies that should never have been done in the first place. Which brings me to the new idea for this article, an idea I promoted on the Sportscience mailing list late last year: peer review of proposals for studies, followed by practically guaranteed publication of studies that conform to their approved proposals. This approach to scientific publication would likely reduce publication bias and solve other problems arising from journals' obsession with inflating their impact factors, from abuse of statistical significance, and from rejection of good research by reviewers who should know better. It turned out that the Lancet already offers this option for researchers proposing clinical trials, although relatively few have used it in the ~10 years it has been available. I made a serious attempt to get a group of my colleagues interested in establishing a journal based this idea, but in the end even I had doubts when it became apparent that we would have to charge authors at least US$1000 per article to cover costs, and substantially more than $1000 unless we did much of the work ourselves without compensation. I have purchased numerous domain names that would be appropriate for the kind of archive of science I had in mind, so if anyone has time or money to pursue this idea further, please contact me. Published
July 2011.
Thomson Reuters is the
publisher and copyright owner of the Journal Citation ReportsŪ. |
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