Update: This is an archived post. The actual impact Factors have been released in June 2017 and JMIR mHealth exceeded our expectations with a stunning impact factor of 4.636
(Toronto, Feb 6th, 2017) Clarivate Analytics (formerly the Intellectual Property and Science Division of Thomson Reuters) recently informed us that JMIR mHealth and uHealth has been accepted for the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), meaning that it will have an official Impact Factor to be released in June 2017 (it will be the 2016 impact factor).
The 2016 impact factor of a journal can be calculated as follows (Wikipedia):
- 2016 impact factor = A/B
where:
- A = the number of times that all items published in that journal in 2014 and 2015 were cited by indexed publications during 2016.
- B = the total number of "citable items" published by that journal in 2014 and 2015.
We previously went through the exercise to calculate a "unofficial" impact factor for 2015 by dividing the number of published articles in the previous two years (B) by the number of results when searching Web of Science for citing articles published in 2015 (A), and we now repeated this exercise for 2016.
The projected impact factor for JMIR mHealth and uHealth (2016) is at least 2.84, calculated from 431 citations (citing articles published in 2016) / 152 (published articles 2014/15).
To be very clear, this is not an official impact factor published in JCR by Thomson Reuters, although it mirrors their methodology (as first proposed by Eugene Garfield). This number represents the average number of citations for our articles published in 2014-2015. This is a conservative measure which is still increasing, because the Web of Science search was conducted early 2017, while the number of citations in 2016 may still increase, as the index catches up on 2016 publications.
This impressive number confirms JMIR mHealth and uHealth as a journal that is at least in the top 25th percentile, cited more often than 75% of the journals listed in the JCR Medical Informatics category. More precisely, it would be ranked #5 in that discipline.
In the meantime, while we await the official Thomson Reuters report with JMIR mHealth and uHealth included, we hope that Tenure & Promotion Commitee's will follow the recommendations of the DORA statement, which recommends to take into account other metrics (in particular article-level metrics, but also "proxy calculations" such as the one conducted above), while we are awaiting an "official" impact factor. We invite authors who are faced with questions from their T&P Committee to include this calculation.
The leading status of JMIR mHealth is also evident from expert surveys. According to a survey among 398 health informatics experts who are asked to rank the top health informatics journals by Dohan et al (The Expert Survey-Based Global Ranking of Management- and Clinical-Centered Health Informatics and IT Journals, Transactions of the International Conference on Health Information Technology Advancement. Paper 45. http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/ichita_transactions/45), JMIR mHealth was ranked as tier A journal (top 20%).