The BJGP in 2004

摘要

Once a year I report to the Editorial Board of the BJGP so that they can consider the performance of the Journal as part of their job to oversee the Journal's content. This year we opened with a celebration that the impact factor rose to over 1.8. It means that the BJGP is again the highest rated specialist journal for family medicine in the world, a distinction it had acquired when I became Editor and which it lost shortly afterwards. The impact factor is a figure reflecting how often papers published in the Journal are cited in the following 2 years. It is widely recognised to have major flaws and to be subject to various influences, generally a devalued performance indicator (even though it is still one of the currencies by which academics measure themselves). As Brendan Delaney (now editor of Family Practice) has pointed out, a figure of 1.8 compared with journals publishing in other specialist fields is very low. Even so this was seen to be something that we should be celebrating.