"Editors! Check Your Impact Factor Data!"

Accessible online at: www.karger.com/drm The Impact Factor (IF) has become an important element for the evaluation of medical literature: I do not want to discuss the bias this may produce, as it has already been covered in many other publications [1–3]. I would like to inform the readers and the editorial board of Dermatology that the calculation of its IF is made according to different criteria than those applied to similar journals in the same field. The calculation of the IF of this particular journal for 2001 was made as follows: the number of articles published in the past two years (1999 and 2000) which were cited in 2001, divided by the total number of papers published in the two past years (1999 and 2000). Obviously with this ratio of cited/published articles, each individual item is of importance. The number of cited articles is difficult to control, and the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) certainly provides an accurate analysis in this regard. The number of published articles is easy to count, but the question is: which articles are included in the total? The Journal Citation Report (JCR) on-line glossary claims that ‘Editorials’ and ‘Letters’ are not included in article counts ‘because they are not generally cited’, a fact which does probably not apply to clinical dermatology journals.