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Subject: PhD Course Work Name: Mouri Ghosh

Discipline: Physiology (K.U.) Date: 04.08.2011

First assignment submitted

1. Short note on Impact factor

To avoid the ill-consequence of the “publish or perish” philosophy within the scientific community, the need for an “objective”

measure of research quality has led to the introduction and subsequent widespread acceptance of impact factor (IF) as a measure

of the scientific quality of journals. The impact of a journal is increasingly being assessed on the basis of the number of times

that their published work, and particularly primary papers, is cited. This quantitative measure, derived from the Science Citation

Index database developed by ISI (the Institute for Scientific Information – now part of the Thomson Corporation), is replacing

the more traditional and informal indices of peer recognition.

The ISI Web of Knowledge indexes more than 11,000 science and social science journals. To merit inclusion in the ISI database

(to receive an IF) a journal must pass a vetting procedure beginning with an inhouse editor with appropriate subject expertise and

concluding with a review and confirmation by the entire editorial team. The assessment involves a number of parameters

including regularity of publication, profile of the editorial team, whether it is peer reviewed and the relevance and topicality of

the contents.

ISI staff search the reference lists of all the journals they cover (citing journal) and count all the citations to record a total for

each destination journal (cited journal). The cited journals are then analyzed to determine the number of articles they contain that

can be considered substantial enough to warrant being counted as source items. It is the source items that attract the citations

from the citing journals.

The IF for a given year is defined as the total number of citations received in that year to articles published in the previous two

years divided by the total number of citable items (source items) published by the journal in those two years.

It shows IF can be improved by increasing the number of citations/ reducing the number of source items, or both. Gradual

growth in the number of articles published should not affect the IF since the extra articles published will have sufficient time to

attract enough extra citations to counterbalance the increased source item count.

The use of IF system however is not without its limitations. Rapidly moving fields, such as molecular biology, where in many

cases critical experiments can be performed in a matter of days, lead to rapid publication and potentially high levels of citation of

preceding papers within the time frame used to calculate IF, whereas in physiology, a long-term feeding study may take several

years to complete so that citation of earlier work on which it is based will not contribute to the impact factor of the original

journals where such work was published. Journals that:

are Not newborn,

have high citation density due to its discipline (eg biochemistry compared to mathematics),

have short half-life (physics compared to physiology journals),

with more review articles,

publishing more basic science results than clinical science results will have higher IF irrespective of the quality of the

article published.

Such a difference in IFs does not truly reflect disparities in the scientific value of these journals. Research disciplines with

journals that have low IF may fail to attract adequate attention from the researcher community hindering a comprehensive

scientific evaluation of an article which requires a multidimensional assessment.

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2. Short note on Citation Index

A citation index is a compilation of all the cited references from journal articles indexed in the database, allowing the user to

easily establish which later documents cite which earlier documents. Broadly, a citation is a reference to a published or

unpublished source; precisely, an abbreviated alphanumeric expression embedded in the body of an intellectual work that

denotes an entry in the bibliographic references section of the work for the purpose of acknowledging the relevance of the works

of others to the topic of discussion at the spot where the citation appears. A prime purpose of a citation is intellectual honesty: to

attribute prior or unoriginal work and ideas to the correct sources, and to allow the reader to determine independently whether

the referenced material supports the author's argument in the claimed way. The first citation indices were legal citators such as

Shepard's Citations (1873).

The cited half-life is a measure of the durability of an article, i.e. for how long it continues to be cited in the literature.

Immediacy Index is defined as the average number of times an article is cited within the same year it was published giving an

indication of the level of current interest in a field or how „hot‟ it is.(vide figure). Citation measures, such as, Impact factors, H

index, Eigenfactor provide very useful insights into scholarly research and its communication and are useful in establishing the

influence journals have within a discipline.

The use of citation counts to rank journals was a technique used in the early part of the nineteenth century but the systematic

ongoing measurement of these counts for scientific journals was initiated by Eugene Garfield at the Institute for Scientific

Information who also pioneered the use of these counts to rank authors and papers. In 1960, ISI introduced the first citation

index for papers published in academic journals, starting with the Science Citation Index (SCI), and later expanding to produce

the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI).

Every reference in all reference lists in every regular journal issue received by the ISI is loaded into the database and is counted.

Supplements containing only abstracts (unless the journal appears on the ISI‟s Top 500 list) are not consistently covered by the

ISI. The citation level will ultimately depend upon visibility of a given journal and, while this is clearly related to circulation. As

far as the editorial content of the journal is

concerned, some types of articles are cited more

heavily than others, eg basic science papers,

review articles are heavily cited whereas case

reports does not attract many citations.

The first automated citation indexing was done

by CiteSeer in 1997. Where previous citation

extraction was a manual process, citation

measures could now scale up and be computed

for any scholarly and scientific field and

document venue, not just those selected by

organizations such as ISI. Elsevier, which

publishes Scopus, is another major general-

purpose academic citation indexing service. They

differ widely in cost: the ISI databases and

Scopus being subscription databases.

Fig. Generalized Citation Curve

3. List of Top International and National Journals in the field of Physiology

List of Top International Journals in the field of Physiology Following their impact factor for the year 2010

29.742 Annual Review of Biochemistry

28.417 Physiological Reviews

26.756 Annual Review of Neuroscience

20.717 NATURE METHODS

16.106 Annual Review of Physiology

14.429 Circulation

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14.191 Nature Neuroscience

14.152 Journal of Clinical Investigation

14.027 NEURON

13.32 Trends in Neurosciences

12.75 Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology

12.032 GASTROENTEROLOGY

10.885 HEPATOLOGY

10.614 GUT

10.558 Blood

9.966 Progress in Neurobiology

9.23 BRAIN

7.878 Annual Review of Nutrition

7.271 Journal of Neuroscience

6.891 Current Opinion in Neurobiology

6.882 American Jjournal of

Gastroenterology

5.818 Quarterly review of biology

5.021 Current opinion in Neurology

4.686 American Journal of Physiology –

Endocrinology and Metabolism

4.33 Current Opinion in Clinical

Nutrition and Metabolic Care

4.283 Journal of General Physiology

4.232 Journal of Applied Physiology

4.107 Current Opinion in

Gastroenterology

4.104 Medicine and Science in Sports

and Exercise

4.041 Journal of Toxicology and

Environmental Health, Part B:

Critical Reviews

3.522 American Journal of Physiology –

Gastrointestinal and Liver

Physiology

3.384 NITRIC OXIDE-BIOLOGY AND

CHEMISTRY

3.349 Neurogastroenterology and

Motility

3.343 American Journal of Nutrition

3.333 Experimental Physiology.

3.284 American Journal of Physiology -

Regulatory, Integrative and

Comparative Physiology

3.091 BMC NEUROSCIENCE

3.030 Journal of Physiology - Paris

3.132 Journal of Exposure Science and

Environmental Epidemiology

3.071 CELL MOTILITY AND THE

CYTOSKELETON

3.04 Journal of Experimental Biology

2.935 Arsenic pollution and remediation:

An International Perspective

2.805 Digestive and Liver Disease

2.786 Clinical Neurophysiology

2.697 Current Neurology and

Neuroscience Reports

2.602 Food and Chemical Toxicology

2.51 Spine

2.463 Journal of Biomechanics

2.4 Journal of Comparative

Physiology B: Biochemical,

Systemic , and Environmental

Physiology

2.325 Comparative Biochemistry and

Physiology C- Pharmacology

Toxicology and Endocrinology

2.322 Journal of Applied Toxicology

2.302 MUSCLE & NERVE

2.24 World Journal of

Gastroenterology

2.214 European Journal of Applied

Physiology

2.146 DIGESTION

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2.134 Comparative Biochemistry and

Physiology A –Molecular &

Integrative Physiology

2.06 Digestive Diseases and Sciences

1.941 BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders

1.933 Journal of Muscle Research and

Cell Motility

1.849 Canadian Journal of Physiology

and Pharmacology

1.822 Journal of Receptors and Signal

Transduction

1.671 Autonomic Neuroscience

1.55 Canadian Journal of

Gastroenterology

1.378 Environmental Toxicology and

Pharmacology

1.377 Ergonomics

1.302 Clinical Physiology and

Functional Imaging

0.702 Indian Journal of Experimental

Biology

0.576 Journal of Muscle Foods

List of Top National Journals in the field of Physiology Following their H index

52.0 Current Science

(Impact factor 0.897 for 2010)

25.0 Indian Journal of Pharmacology

25.0 Journal of Postgraduate Medicine

24.0 Indian Heart Journal

22.0 Indian Journal of

Gastroenterology

21.0 National Medical Journal of India

21.0 Neurology India

20.0 Indian Journal of Pharmaceutical

Sciences

19.0 Indian Drugs

19.0 Journal of Scientific and Industrial

Research

16.0 Journal of Environmental Biology

15.0 Tropical gastroenterology :

official journal of the Digestive

Diseases Foundation

14.0 Pollution Research

12.0 Indian Journal of Pathology and

Microbiology

12.0 Indian journal of chest diseases &

allied sciences

10.0 Indian Journal of Environmental

Protection

9.0 Indian Pacing and

Electrophysiology Journal

8.0 Journal of Natural Remedies

5.0 Indian Journal of Urology

5.0 Annals of Indian Academy of

Neurology

4.0 Indian Journal of Hematology and

Blood Transfusion

3.0 Journal of Pediatric Neurosciences

3.0 Asian Journal of Pharmaceutics

3.0 Indian Journal of Gender Studies

2.0 Journal of Human Reproductive

Sciences

2.0 Indian Journal of Forensic

Medicine and Toxicology

Reference: SCI journal list for international journals and their impact factors and The SCImago Journal &

Country Rank developed from the information contained in the Scopus® database (Elsevier B.V.) for

national journals and their H index.