The Hunt for Impact

Publishing a journal is all about impact. Impact is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as (1) the action of one object coming forcibly into contact with another or (2) a marked effect or influence. Obviously, for a journal, (1) should not apply. However, impact is important for a journal, especially if it is supported by an organisation. Many national and international societies run their own journals and often through a publishing house. This costs money. Journal impact is defined by a number of metrics including journal impact factor, journal cite score and journal citation indicator, but what do these actually mean to the reader? A Google search using the words "why does journal impact factor matter?" came up with the following artificial intelligence generated statement which sums up quite nicely. "Journal Impact Factor (JIF) matters as a benchmark for a journal's influence, quality, and importance within its field, affecting researchers' decisions on where to publish and influencing career advancement, promotions, and grant applications." JIF is the traditional metric and all journals are ranked using it; the higher the better. JIF may be an indicator of journal quality, that is, what you read is important and/or of high scientific merit. It is be used by authors to decide where to publish. For example, the Australian Dental Journal receives over 800 submissions a year. Some academic institutions will look at JIF for academic promotions. Lastly, it may indicate if a journal should continue to be published. However, JIF has limitations as it reflects the journal overall and not individual papers, may be skewed by high citations of one paper, and is generally specific to just one field, such as dentistry. Hence the introduction of other metrics. Journal CiteScore is stated by Wiley publishing house as "The CiteScore is calculated by dividing the number of citations to documents published in a 4-year period by the number of documents in same 4-year period." Included in calculating its value are citations from articles, reviews, conference presentations, and book chapters, all of which really reflect the quality of the journal papers. Lastly, the journal citation indicator looks at how the journal compares across different fields of research, not just dentistry, taking into account how many editions a year and how many citations. It is meant to allow easy comparison of a journal across disciplines. These two measures are meant to complement and remove some of the issues with JIF. However, JIF is still the most commonly used. The 2024 JIF for the Australian Dental Journal is 2.4, the highest ever and places the journal in the top 25% of dental journals worldwide. There has been a conscious effort to promote Australian and New Zealand research, and it is pleasing to see that the quality of our research is recognised. The author declares no conflicts of interest. The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.