Pharmacotherapy’s Impact Factor Increased to 3.196!

June 29, 2018
Lindsay DeVane, Editor-in-Chief, Pharmacotherapy

ACCP members and readers of the ACCP Report will be familiar with the term Impact Factor (IF). This metric is published each year by Clarivate Analytics, a company providing multiple products relating to scientific research insights. The IF reflects a journal’s performance and status through a record of how often its articles are cited in other biomedical journals. The release of IF data is eagerly awaited each year by publishers and editorial teams. The data released June 26 ranked 12,300 journals in terms of citations during 2017 of articles published during 2015-2016.

The IF for Pharmacotherapy has increased to 3.196. The increase from last year’s value of 2.932 pushes Pharmacotherapy over an important IF threshold of 3.0 for an all-time high. This increase can be put into a different perspective by understanding how Pharmacotherapy is ranked within its designated journal category, Pharmacy and Pharmacology. Last year, Pharmacotherapy broke into the top 100 journals in this category by having the 95th highest IF out of 256 journals. This year, the position improved further with the journal ranked 80th out of 261 journals.

Although the use of IF data as the sole measure of journal quality has been widely criticized, it remains a vital measure in biomedical publishing of the impact of a journal on its field. Perhaps an analogy can be made to a country’s gross domestic product (GDP), the total value of goods produced and services provided by a country in one year. Clearly, neither of these two metrics tell a complete story, but both can be regarded as primary metrics of performance. This column will supplement the journal’s citation metrics with data on downloads and international readership along with comparisons to other journals in the future.

The publication of Pharmacotherapy is made possible through the combined effort of many individuals, including publication staff, editors, editorial board members, reviewers, and others. Most important are the authors who choose to submit their best work to the journal. The exposure to an international readership of articles published in Pharmacotherapy is increasing. Hopefully, the quality of the journal reflected by an IF that has steadily increased over several years will continue to stimulate important submissions to improve drug therapy.