There are all sorts of flaws with using impact factors for judging the quality of biomedical research. Love them or hate them, just getting hold of impact factors for journals in bioinformatics and related fields is much harder than it should be, so I thought I'd reproduce some statistics I gathered here. The rankings, which you should use with caution [1,2], are the latest as of June 2006 (and apply to citations in 2005) courtesy of Journal Citation Reports®, part of Thomson ISI Web of Knowledge. JCR has a pretty horrible clunky web interface when compared to some of its rivals [3,4], maybe one day they'll make it better. Anyway, this is not a comprehensive list, just a fairly random selection of bioinformatics and computer science journals that publish articles I've been reading the last few years.
| Journal | ISI impact factor |
| Science | 30.927 |
| Cell | 29.431 |
| Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology | 29.852 |
| Nature | 29.273 |
| Nature Genetics | 25.797 |
| Nature Biotechnology | 22.378 |
| Nature Reviews Drug Discovery | 18.775 |
| PLOS Biology | 14.672 |
| PNAS | 10.231 |
| Genome Research | 10.139 |
| Genome Biology | 9.712 |
| Drug Discovery Today | 7.755 |
| Nucleic Acids Research | 7.552 |
| Bioessays | 6.787 |
| Plant Physiology | 6.114 |
| Bioinformatics (OUP) | 6.019 |
| BMC Bioinformatics | 4.958 |
| BMC Genomics | 4.092 |
| Proteins: structure, function and bioinformatics | 4.684 |
| IEEE Intelligent Systems | 2.560 |
| Journal of Computational Biology | 2.446 |
| Journal of Biomedical Informatics | 2.388 |
| IEEE Internet Computing | 2.304 |
| Artificial Intelligence in Medicine | 1.882 |
| Comparative and Functional Genomics | 0.992 |
| Concurrency and Computation: Practice and experience | 0.535 |
| Briefings in Bioinformatics (OUP) | not listed |
| PLOS Computational Biology | not listed |
| Journal of Web Semantics | not listed |
Comments
Rise of BMC
...young upstart BioMed Central Bioinformatics...
I like all of the BMC Journals and on the whole, rate BMC Bioinformatics over Bioinformatics. The latter journal has become almost solely a methods/algorithms journal, whereas the former has a lot more interest in terms of application to real biological problems.
And yet - look at the problems that the BMC journals had initially in getting established - all because noone could figure out how impact factors applied to free, online articles! The nonsense that is impact factors, once again.
Good work
Everything about impact factors is ridiculous - the difficulty in obtaining what should be freely-available and up to date data is perhaps the most ridiculous aspect. Thanks for the list.
Given that many journal webpages now display their impact factor, I wonder how many could be obtained using scrapers?
Screen Scraping Hell
IMHO, screen-scraping this kind of data is a mugs game, or as Lincoln Stein once put it: mediaeval torture, best left as a task for the sado-masochists, who actually like having to repeatedly rewrite their code!
agreed
IMHO, screen-scraping this kind of data is a mugs game
I'm with you there. Scraping seems to be the basis of Zotero, which everyone is talking about just now. Broken scraping seems to be the reason for its current inability to import from PubMed/HubMed.
Having said that, I just wrote a scraper to pull hundreds of fasta files from an online genome database. It was a one-off though, honest.
What a mess
Yeah, impact factors are always horribly out of date, are difficult to get hold of, often misleading and in the hands of a for-profit organisation that is responsible primarily to its shareholders. How did research assessment become so overly dependent on such figures?
Digestability
Probably because a single, simple metric has intuitive appeal. Eugene Garfield, the guy behind IFs, has commented on their use and abuse in JAMA and on the Thomson website (pdf). There's quite a large literature critical of whole concept, too.