The Tour de Journals 2007: Impact Factors in Exercise and Sport Will G Sportscience 11, 9-11, 2007
(sportsci.org/j2007/wghif.htm)
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Once again I find myself reluctantly presenting the latest standings of the journals in exercise and sport medicine and science, as determined by their recently published impact factors. A journal’s impact factor is calculated for the previous year (2006) by counting up the number of times any of the journal’s papers published in 2004 and 2005 appeared in the reference lists of all papers published in all journals in 2006 (including the journal itself), then dividing by the total number of papers in the journal for 2004 and 2005. The result is the recent average annual rate of citation of the journal’s recent articles, a relative measure of the importance of the journal. Thomson Scientific performs this exercise every year and publishes the outcome on its site for Journal Citation Reports. You can access present and past impact factors and other citation statistics at this site only if your institution has a subscription to the Web of Knowledge. I have summarized the impact factors for journals in our disciplines in Table 1. To comply with Thomson Scientific’s policy of acceptable use, I am allowed to show only this year’s factors, and I have had to show some of the lower impact factors as inequalities. See my article last year for previous impact factors and for a comparison of impact factors in different disciplines (where you will see that our impact factors are about the same as those of comparable disciplines). An earlier article has a critique of the impact factor. The ranking in the Abstract of this article is for journals that specialize only in exercise or sport. The impact factors in Table 1 include more generic journals that sometimes publish papers on some aspect of exercise or sport medicine and science. I have included these journals in the following analysis of changes in the impact factor since last year. The big winners, with improvements of ³70%, are all previously low-impact journals (impact factor <1.0). The most remarkable is the infinite percent improvement of Hakan Gur’s on-line Journal of Sports Science and Medicine, which acquired a factor for the first time, a respectable 0.6. The next echelon of improvers (up 30-69%) includes Canadian Journal of Applied Physiology (1.6), Human Movement Science (1.3), and Journal of Applied Sport Psychology (1.2). On the next level (10-29%), British Journal of Sports Medicine continued upwards to 2.2, but the American Journal of Sports Medicine kept ahead by rising to 2.7, while Exercise and Sport Sciences Reviews is straddling the 3.0 hurdle. It’s also good to see Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research continuing to move up, to 1.3. Noteworthy journals showing less than ±10% change include Journal of Applied Physiology (3.2), Journal of Sports Sciences (1.8), Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise (2.9), Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports (2.0), and Sports Medicine (3.5). Among the big losers are Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine, which rose spectacularly from 1.4 to 2.9 last year, only to fall back to 1.7 this year. Major fluctuations of this kind are probably a consequence of a single highly cited review passing beyond the two-year window for calculation of the impact factor. In reality this journal, like most others in our field, is probably moving steadily upwards.
Thomson Scientific, Inc. is the publisher and copyright
owner of the Journal Citation Reports®. Published Aug 2007 |
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