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JMIR's Impact Factor 2013: 4.7 (5 year IF: 5.7), ranked #1 journal for the 5th time

(an update for July 2015 is available here)

(Toronto, 29 July 2014) Today the 2013 journal impact factors (JIF) were released by Thomson Reuters. We are happy and proud to report that --for the fifth year-- the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR, www.jmir.org), the flagship journal of JMIR Publications, is once again ranked as the leading (#1) journal in its discipline, with a 2013 impact factor of 4.7, out of 25 leading medical informatics journals. These results hold even if the impact factor is corrected for journal self-cites.

The impact factor 2013 measures how often articles published in the last 2 years (2011-2012) were cited in 2013, and is (for better or worse) an important metric for academics when deciding where to submit their best work. To put this in perspective, an impact factor of 4.7 is roughly the impact factor of Annals of Medicine, a well respected general medicine journal. JMIR would be on rank 17 of all general medical journals (NEJM, JAMA, The BMJ etc), if it were listed in the general medical journal category.

This also once again puts JMIR clearly ahead of the runner-up, JAMIA, published by the BMJ Group for the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), which has an impact factor of 3.9. Another important Open Access (general medical journal) competitor, Plos One, is continuing its decline and has an impact factor of 3.5. Elsevier's International Journal of Medical Informatics is ranked 4th with 2.7. JMIR's impact factor also once again puts it ahead of all 48 specialist journals of the BMC series (published by Springer's BiomedCentral), including BMC Med Inform Decis (1.5), and ahead of all 47 Hindawi journal titles. Schattauers Meth Inform Med (1.1) and Applied Clinical Inform (0.3) are at the bottom of the field. JMIR is also ranked #4 in the large health care sciences & services category (which lists 85 journals), ahead of respected journals such as Health Affairs. Equally remarkable is the fact that JMIR is now the largest journal among all medical informatics journals, with 285 articles published in the period for which the 2013 JIF was calculated. Only Stat Med (which is a statistics journal) has published more articles than JMIR. JMIR is now publishing daily (every weekday), and expects to publish over 500 articles in 2014 alone, including articles in a dozen new sister journals.

Once again, this is a major achievement for a small publisher, which was founded independently by a leading academic in the field, Prof Gunther Eysenbach (an elected Fellow of the ACMI), who in the late 90ies saw an emerging field and helped founding and shaping it by giving leading scholars a platform to disseminate their work in journals and conferences.

"Our success has not only defined and given credibility to a new field of research, which we called "medical Internet research" (and which others now call digital health, participatory medicine or health 2.0), but has also put pressure on traditional publishers in the field to make more research open access", Eysenbach says in a statement released Tuesday. "We also welcome that other publishers are now entering the field with similar journal titles related to Internet interventions and digital health, which is a sign that the field has matured and that the success of JMIR has inspired others.". Despite the fact that JMIR came out in the JIF ranking on top in the past 6 years, Eysenbach is remains very critical of giving too much weight to the impact factor, and warns that "Despite the importance of the impact factor, we are actually not making our decisions based on Impact Factor considerations. More important is a fit with the field and innovation - we are not a traditional medical informatics journal, but have a very applied and also patient/consumer-oriented focus, in that we are less interested in papers that report innovations for clinicians - these are referred to our new sister journals. For example, clinical informatics papers should be submitted to our new sister journal JMIR Med Inform, which focusses on traditional medical informatics topics as well as emerging topics like big data in medicine. Unfortunately, it takes many years for new journals to get indexed, and I agree with the DORA statement which says that overreliance on the impact factor is harming innovation and progress. New emerging areas of research such as serious games or mhealth/uhealth, for which we have created sister journals, are not yet covered by the SCI/JIF, which is years behind. We have published seminal works in our sister journals such as JMIR mHealth, where individual articles have attracted significant citations, but which will have to wait for an impact factor for a few years. We urge our authors to make a decision on where to submit not solely on the basis of the impact factor, and to consider our sister and partner journals as well. We are confident that once indexed by SCI they will come out on top of the field as well.".

JMIR Publications, the leading publisher for digital health, continues to grow, now has offices in Toronto and Hongkong, and publishes a dozen journals at the intersection between health and technology/innovation, including JMIR Research Protocols, JMIR Serious Games, JMIR Medical Informatics, interactive Journal of Medical Research, JMIR mHealth and uHealth, JMIR Mental Health, JMIR Human Factors, JMIR Rehabilitation and Cyborg Technologies, Medicine 2.0, and others. JMIR Publications also produces the leading academic conference series in Internet research, social media, and mhealth (www.medicine20congress.org).

JMIR Publications was a cofounder of OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association) and is committed to highest quality and ethical standards, as well as quick turnaround times. JMIR Publications was the first open access journal in the field, was the first journal implementing open peer-review and was the first journal publishing Article Level Impact Metrics based on social media ("Twimpact Factor") alongside its articles. JMIR Publications continues to innovate and is involved in a new startup TrendMD, an novel academic discovery and dissemination platform for publishers and academic authors (www.trendmd.com). We thank all our outstanding authors, readers and peer-reviewers, who are leaders in their field and continue to contribute to our success by submitting their best work to JMIR Publications or reviewing papers for us.