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Editorials
Impact factor
  1. MP Ward Platt1,
  2. Ben Stenson2,
  3. Ann Stark3,
  4. Christian Poets4
  1. 1Neonatal Service, Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
  2. 2Simpson Centre for Reproductive Health, Edinburgh, UK
  3. 3Department of Pediatrics, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, USA
  4. 4Department of Neonatology, University of Tuebingen, Tuebingen, Germany
  1. Correspondence to MP Ward Platt, Neonatal Service, Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 4LP, UK; m.p.ward-platt{at}ncl.ac.uk

https://doi.org/10.1136/archdischild-2011-300924

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    Readers may have noticed that the impact factor for Fetal and Neonatal is now 3.13 – ahead of ADC on 2.6. The F&N figure has increased progressively from 2.05 in 2005. The F&N editorial team are rather pleased about this, but what does it mean, why should we care and why should our readers care?

    As Editors, we care because the increased impact factor means that we are publishing articles that are more frequently cited than before. This is a proxy for saying that the articles matter more to the medical/scientific community: they are in some sense more ‘important’, so the journal has become more influential among that community. We also care because authors who are employed by universities have the quality of their work assessed on the basis of the impact factors of the journals in which they are published, so the higher our impact factor, the more …

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    Footnotes

    • Competing interests MWP is Edition Editor of F&N; BS, AS and CP are associate editors of F&N.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.