The Journal Impact Factor of Orthopaedic Journals Does not Predict Individual Paper Citation Rate

Abstract

Background:The journal impact factor (JIF) is thought to reflect the average number of citations an article will receive and therefore can influence study impact and clinical decision making. However, analysis of citation rates across multiple scientific and research domains has shown that most articles will not reach this expected number of citations. This phenomenon is known as citation skew and it has not previously been examined in the orthopaedic literature. The objective of this study was to determine the extent to which citation skew exists within orthopaedic journals and thus to determine whether the JIF in the orthopaedic literature reflects individual study citation rates.Methods:We used data from the Thomson Reuters (now Clarivate Analytics) Web of Science to determine the 2015 JIF and citation distribution for all orthopaedic journals listed in the database. We calculated the percentage of articles with fewer citations than the JIF for each journal. Finally, we analyzed the citation distribution within groups of orthopaedic subspecialty publications.Results:We identified a total of 74 orthopaedic journals and 29,296 publications for the years 2013 and 2014. Across all orthopaedic journals, 85% of published articles are cited fewer times than the JIF would indicate. The median number of citations of all articles was zero for all journals (interquartile range = 0-0) except for seven journals, for which the median number of citations per article was 1.Conclusion:Citation skew is prevalent across the orthopaedic literature. Most published work is not cited in the first 2 years following publication, and the JIFs are the result of a few highly cited articles. The assessment of an individual orthopaedic study's quality should not be determined by the JIF but rather by direct evaluation of the methodology, relevance, and appropriateness of the study's conclusions.

Citation inequality and the Journal Impact Factor: median, mean, (does it) matter?

“…These results are in line with Bozzo et al who showed that for 74 orthopaedic journals, the median number of citations is zero for the majority of journals, i.e. 67 journals (90.5%) (Bozzo et al 2017). Furthermore, the number of rankings is reduced to 13 instead of 135 or 159 rank positions for the categories Med-R&E and Med-G&I, respectively-resulting in individual journals at high medianbased ranking positions and lower ranking positions comprising rather large numbers of journals.…”

“…that the relatively high JIF of the Top 3 journals within each category tends to attract citations to all published items in these journals thus reducing the proportion of non-cited articles. As shown in Table 3, other studies reported values in the range between < 20 and 70% of CI (Weale et al 2004;Asaad et al 2019;Opthof et al 2004;Lustosa et al 2012;Bozzo et al 2017). Weale and colleagues (Weale et al 2004) discussed the percentage of articles per journal receiving no citations (rate of non-citation) as a possible alternative for measuring journal quality due to their observation that high-JIF journal have lower rates of non-citations.…”

What drives citations of frontier application publications?

“…The elasticity shows that publication of a frontier application paper in a journal with TRIF would increase citations beyond zero by 1.17% above the reference, that is, those that are not published in journals with TRIF. This estimate is statistically significant at less than 0.00%, consistent with the existing literature (Asaad et al, 2019;Bornmann, 2017;Bozzo et al, 2017;Cartwright and Savino, 2009;Elkins et al, 2010;Lee et al, 2010).…”

Correlation Between Quality of Evidence and Number of Citations in Top 50 Cited Articles in Rotator Cuff Repair Surgery

“… 20 However, further evidence suggests that journal impact factors are related directly to a few highly cited articles within the journal and are not reflective of the quality of the majority of the articles published in the journal. 6 As such, several new metrics have been created to objectively assign a value to journals based on the number of citations of a journal over a given time period, including the Immediacy Index, SCImago Journal Rank, CiteScore, Source Normalized Impact per Paper, h-index, 2-year impact factor, 5-year impact factor, and ResearchGate Score. This has led to several studies analyzing the top cited articles in their respective fields.…”