The Impact of the Impact Factor

Questioning the Impact of the Impact Factor. A Brief Review and Future Directions

Purpose: To provide a brief review of literature on the journal impact factors (JIF) and the newer research metrics being proposed or implemented.Methods: The authors performed a PubMed search of articles published in the English language on the journal impact factors. Data captured include historical perspectives, evolution, calculation, criticisms of JIF and their rebuttals, and organized efforts to address JIF issues, alternate research metrics, and future directions. Specific emphasis was laid on evaluating the criticisms, current lacunae, and the changing practice patterns.Results: One of the measures to assess the research impact of an article is the number of citations it receives. Hence, citation-based metrics are commonly used for such purposes. While editors and well-known scholars refrain from attributing article success to the journal's prominence, the same is not true for most authors. JIF is still one of the top factors when deciding on an article submission. JIF is today an acceptable objective and quantifiable measure of knowledge dissemination. However, JIF should not be used as a surrogate measure to assess an individual researcher or an individual article. The reverence to JIF in this regard needs to be questioned. While alternate metrics or altmetrics have their advantages and limitations, they nevertheless augur well an era where scientometrics are complementary to one another without undue reliance on a sole parameter.Conclusion: While there is no need to demonize the JIF, its role in the scholarly assessment should be scaled down. The over-reliance and undue hype surrounding it should be discouraged at multiple scientific levels.

The Evolution of Journal of Korean Neurosurgical Society from 2017 to 2020 : The Beginning of a Great Development

Every researcher wants their research to gain more recognition, and this desire is achieved by publishing their article in a journal with higher impact. It is very important to get researchers interested in the Journal of Korean Neurosurgical Society (JKNS). Therefore, the first goal was to promote the publication of papers in our journal. To do this, a table of contents was sent out, and the citation ranking was announced every 2 months. Several efforts have been made to publish good papers. Foreign speakers, who were invited to a conference hosted by the Korean Neurosurgical Society were contacted and politely requested to write a paper addressing their recent research. Domestic and international researchers highly renowned in their fields were also contacted to submit their novel works to our journal. The journal impact factor of our journal has continued to rise for the last 3 years and reached 1.376 in 2019. It can be said that the JKNS is now competitive with other international neurosurgery journals. These achievements were not due to the efforts of the editorial boards alone. This was because our society members have submitted very good papers, and because many of our members have cited the papers published in our journal. We believe that this will continue in the future. The next step of evolution of the JKNS has begun, and this is the beginning of another great development.

Vaccination for Human Papillomavirus: an historic and bibliometric study

A systematic literature review was conducted to describe in a historical perspective the evolution of studies concerning HPV vaccination. The search identified 794 articles of which 568 were included. The first article was published in 2001, and the maximum annual number of publications was reached in 2014. The average number of authors per paper was 8.8. Papers originated from 49 different countries, with the USA accounted for the maximum number of publications (n = 217). Efficacy (46.5%) and safety (31.0%) were the most prevalent objectives. Clinical trials constituted the largest group of methods (37.9%). Chronological trends did not reveal any lasting curve-crossings, indicating that the priority topics have remained the same. The geographical origin of these studies raises questions about the transposability of the results to populations where HPV vaccination has been studied only a little. This study could help guide future research to less-studied research objectives, particularly for vaccines.

Characterizing Hotspots and Frontier Landscapes of Diabetes-Specific Distress from 2000 to 2018: A Bibliometric Study

Objectives

This work aims to comprehensively characterize hotspots and frontier landscapes concerning diabetes-specific distress from 2000 to 2018.

Materials and Methods

Firstly, diabetes-specific distress-related literature was retrieved and downloaded from the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC). Secondly, WoSCC self-contained toolkits and GraphPad Prism7 were conducted to analyze general characteristics, including literature products, countries, institutes, authors, and journal resource. Finally, CiteSpace V Toolkits was put forward to implement advanced analysis, consisting of keyword-term frequency and co-occurrence, references-cited frequency and co-occurrence, and burst detection for keyword terms and references cited, which uncovers the hotspots and frontiers of diabetes-specific distress.

Results

After preprocessing, our study included a total of 1051 papers concerning diabetes-specific distress. Publication outputs increased smoothly year by year. Compared with other journals, diabetic medicine delivered the largest number of documents. The United States occupied the leading positions, and the most productive institution was the University of California System in terms of literature products. Fisher L. has the highest references-cited frequency. Prevalence of diabetes-specific distress, diabetes-specific distress and glycemic control, diabetes-specific distress and depression comorbidity, and diabetes-specific distress and risk factors were the research hotspots, whereas the measure of diabetes-specific distress and latent and serious/severe diabetes-specific distress was the research frontiers.

Conclusions

Overall, our study may inspire researchers to show great interest in diabetes-specific distress in the next few years.