Olympian Impact
Factors: Top Journals in Exercise and Sports Science and Medicine for 2008 Will G Sportscience
12, 22-24, 2008 (sportsci.org/2008/wghif.htm)
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Partly
because researchers find journal impact factors interesting, partly because
no other trustworthy objective measure of journal importance currently
exists, and partly because I am always short of copy for Sportscience, I am
pleased to present once again the annual list of impact factors for journals
in our disciplines. The impact factor represents the number of citations that
a journal’s average recent (2005-2006) article received in all 2007 journal
articles. The factors are compiled by Thomson Scientific and published as
Journal Citation Reports each year around June-July. Access to the reports is
possible only via an institutional subscription. Consult last year’s summary and the links there to earlier summaries for
more information on the impact factor. Table 1
shows the table of impact factors, with journals sorted alphabetically and
movements in the factor color coded. 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. The
ranking of the journals specializing in sport or exercise is shown in the
Abstract of this article, whereas the table includes journals of a more
generic nature that accept articles on some aspect of exercise or sport
science or medicine. Some of these journals, for example those devoted to
applied physiology, have higher impact factors that reflect the greater level
of activity in those disciplines. For the same reason, journals with a
specific focus, such as sport history, have low impact factors that do not
necessarily reflect article quality. Dissatisfaction
with this and other aspects of the impact factor has led to a proposal for
ranking journals based on the pagerank algorithm Google uses to rank hits.
Pagerank is essentially a measure of how many citations a journal receives
from journals that receive higher rates of citation. As such, it is described
as a measure of prestige. (For more, see an article in Wikipedia.) Alas, the measure
does not seem to be adjusted in any way for journal size, so journals with
more articles receive more citations: prestige, it seems, is all about being
big. The Journal of Biological Chemistry is huge (37,920 pages last year),
which probably explains why only Nature beat it to the top of the pagerank
list. Nature is much smaller (~6500 pages last year) but gets far more
citations per article (impact factor 29 vs JBC’s 5.6). The pagerank divided by the annual number
of articles would be a more sensible measure of prestige. This year
I made the effort to understand other citation statistics featured in the
Journal Citation Reports. The cited
half-life is described as “the median age of the articles cited in the
JCR year… A higher or lower cited half-life does not imply any particular
value for a journal.” I skimmed values of this statistic for the sport
science journals, and I have to agree there is no obvious useful information
in this statistic for researchers. The immediacy
index refers to “the average number of times an article is cited in the
year it is published… For comparing journals specializing in cutting-edge
research, the immediacy index can provide a useful perspective.” Perhaps, but
I would argue not for journals in exercise and sport science.
Thomson
Scientific, Inc. is the publisher and copyright owner of the Journal Citation
Reports®. Published
July 2008 |
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