A Proposal for Topic‐based Impact Factors and their Application to Occupational Health Literature

A comparison of evaluation metrics for biomedical journals, articles, and websites in terms of sensitivity to topic

Evaluating the biomedical literature and health-related websites for quality are challenging information retrieval tasks. Current commonly used methods include impact factor for journals, PubMed's clinical query filters and machine learning-based filter models for articles, and PageRank for websites. Previous work has focused on the average performance of these methods without considering the topic, and it is unknown how performance varies for specific topics or focused searches. Clinicians, researchers, and users should be aware when expected performance is not achieved for specific topics. The present work analyzes the behavior of these methods for a variety of topics. Impact factor, clinical query filters, and PageRank vary widely across different topics while a topic-specific impact factor and machine learning-based filter models are more stable. The results demonstrate that a method may perform excellently on average but struggle when used on a number of narrower topics. Topic-adjusted metrics and other topic robust methods have an advantage in such situations. Users of traditional topic-sensitive metrics should be aware of their limitations.

A 30-year citation analysis of bibliometric trends at the Archives Of Environmental Health, 1975-2004

This article describes a 30-year citation analysis of the Archives of Environmental Health (AEH), from the earliest available data in 1975, to 2004, when it became the Archives of Environmental & Occupational Health (AEOH). Longitudinal trends were examined regarding the number of items published, the number of citations received, the immediacy index, and the journal's impact factor. A list of the 5 most highly cited articles was also established, including citation frequency and citation lag times. Overall, this study demonstrates that citation analysis can provide an interesting look at the development of a journal over time. The examination of what articles, themes, and topics were being published, cited, or ignored also offers a unique insight into the direction of not only a particular journal, but also the discipline within which it exists.

Historical development of the journal impact factor and its relevance for occupational health

For better or for worse, the advent of journal impact factors last century marked a key turning point in the global development of scientific publication and referencing systems. Since that time however, the concept has attracted considerable attention from a variety of sources, and its usefulness for relatively small research fields such as occupational health, has also been debated. For these reasons, the current paper provides a descriptive history of the journal impact factor and a discussion of its relevance for occupational health. Developmental milestones, inherent shortcomings and future challenges are also described, along with techniques used for increasing the impact factor and some potential strategies for improvement of the citation indexing system. While many scholars now question its increasingly prominent role in the evaluation of scientific research, the journal impact factor continues to form an important component in the dissemination and retrieval of scientific literature in the occupational health field, as elsewhere. Due to the controversy incurred since its inception however, and the increasingly diverse manner in which it is now being used, it remains to be seen what the next 50 years of journal impact factors will bring.