As a radiology resident in 1939, Earl Miller began to feel that he had slighted the clinical aspects of his training. To cram for his board examination, he decided to read every issue of the gray and yellow journals. That meant one journal every evening and three or four on weekends. When he finished, he had absorbed all of the American literature of radiology. He passed his board examination.
Since that year, we have seen a proliferation of other sponsored journals in radiology. Last summer, I learned from Rebecca Haines that the worldwide count is now 84 publications containing original articles about some aspect of radiology. The list includes periodicals relating to radiation oncology, ultrasound, nuclear imaging, computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, plus imaging of specific body systems, computers and digital imaging, and one addressed by title to molecular imaging.
These are journals sponsored by scientific societies. The number does not include independent publications for radiologists, technologists, business managers, and every other identifiable market group. Nor does the list of 84 include the websites and electronic ventures that pop up and are gone in a few months. Of course, many of the sponsored journals have supplemented ink on paper with their own websites where printed matter is replicated, often in advance of actual publication.
How is the success of a journal measured? It used to be by the number of subscribers. But if every member of the sponsoring society gets the journal, that proves nothing about acceptance.
One method in the last few years is by the number of citations of articles in a given year. To this is added a concept called the impact factor, which mathematically relates the citations to the number of articles multiplied by X and divided by the square root of Y. This is cited in advertising sales and in other ways of thumping one’s chest. The calculations include citations of other articles in the same journal. Rumor has it that some editors suggest strongly to aspiring contributors that their bibliographic listing should include more articles from that journal. There is also the allegation that a few reviewers fault a manuscript for the author’s failure to reference some of the reviewer’s articles.
This gamesmanship can be misleading in that it does not count citations besides those in radiology or medicine journals. In August 2004, I contributed to an article in this publication about a study of chest films obtained in support of claims of lung damage to asbestos workers. Because the article contrasted the strongly positive findings of film readers employed by plaintiffs with a blinded review of the same films by six experts, it kicked up a lasting furor among lawyers and legal publications. If those citations were counted, they would have swelled the total citations and boosted the impact factor. They were not. Nor were any of the articles in newspapers and trade magazines or even the reference in the Congressional Record .
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