Monitoring the success of articles: a look back and a look ahead

The Editorial Team at Cardiovascular Research (CVR) is constantly trying to evaluate which research topics are the most interesting to its readers. Two ways we do this is to look at which articles are most often downloaded from the Journal's website on the Internet and which are cited most frequently in the literature. Now, at the end of 2008, we are in a position to look back at the year 2007 to see how well the papers from last year performed and which were most popular. In addition, this will give us a look ahead at our next impact factor for 2008. Table 1 shows the 20 most-cited articles from 2007. It is not surprising that review articles were the most cited, with all of the top 10 being reviews. Interestingly, 9 of these reviews were published in Spotlight or Review Focus issues, which are special issues devoted to a particular theme. To plan and compose these special, topic-oriented issues of the journal is quite demanding. The outstanding attention that they receive proves their value. In addition, but not shown here, original articles published in such special issues are also rewarded with high citation and download rates. Most-cited articles from 2007 (full reference given in reference list) aReference numbers are shown as superscript. Most-cited articles from 2007 (full reference given in reference list) aReference numbers are shown as superscript. The value of download rates as a tool to rapidly evaluate the interest and opportunity of an article relies on the assumption that the number of times an article is downloaded from the Web correlates with the number of times it is cited. We tested this now for this group of papers and it turned out to be true. We found indeed a significant, positive correlation between the number of citations and the number of downloads for the papers from 2007 (Figure 1). Correlation between the number of downloads and the number of times cited in the literature for original and review articles published in Cardiovascular Research in 2007. For the correlation, R2 was 0.595 and P < 0.001. For the editors, assessing CVR article ‘performance’ serves several purposes: first, we are constantly looking for new trends in our scientific community in order to organize future special issues and invite review articles. Good citations afterwards prove that we are moving in the right direction. Secondly, we monitor the success of the Journal as a broad basic science platform in cardiovascular research. Indeed, we find that good citations of CVR articles are not confined to certain subdisciplines or methodological areas. Thirdly, we try to anticipate the development of CVR's impact factor, usually with good success. For the 2008 impact factor of CVR, we are again expecting a high value. The present analysis shows clearly that the concept of nutrition as related to cardiovascular topics is a popular one, with the Spotlight on the ‘Role of Nutrition in Mechanisms of Cardiovascular Disease’ contributing seven of the 20 top-cited and -downloaded articles (positions 1, 2, 5, 7, 9, 10, and 19 in Table 1) and almost half of the top reviews. This is remarkable since, for a long time, effects of nutrition on cardiovascular diseases had escaped mechanistic analysis. Although CVR articles are typically cited in Circulation Research, the Journal of Molecular and Cellular Cardiology, and the American Journal of Physiology-Heart and Circulatory Physiology, these articles were cited not only in cardiovascular journals but also in journals dealing with nutrition, toxicology and preventative medicine. We hope that this overview of successful 2007 articles and the prospect of high impact factors in the future (currently 6.127) encourage even more cardiovascular researchers to submit their articles to CVR. Note that the turnover time for the first decision is only 3 weeks on average from the moment you click the button to submit your article, and once accepted it takes only 3 working days for online publication!