Initial Impact
The Journal of Hospital Medicine’s debut impact factor (IF) ranks it in the top 20% of its cohort—no small achievement for a peer-reviewed medical journal in its fourth year of publication.
JHM’s 2008 IF is 3.163, a stronger-than-expected showing that Editor-in-Chief Mark V. Williams, MD, FACP, FHM, hopes will translate into increased submissions.
JHM ranks No. 21 out of 107 journals in the Medicine, General, and Internal subject category. Impact factors are an industry metric used as a rough average of citations received by peer-reviewed journals. For comparison’s sake, the IF for the Journal of General Internal Medicine is 2.72; the IF for the Annals of Internal Medicine is 17.457; and the IF for the New England Journal of Medicine is 50.017.
“In context of other journals of similar editorial scope … an [IF score] does indicate something about its influence,” says James Testa, senior director of editorial development and publisher relations for Thomson Reuters, which calculates the score.
Dr. Williams is a little more effusive. The IF, he says, “tells us we need to keep doing what we’re doing. … There are journals that are 20 years old that don’t have impact factors as high as we do.” Dr. Williams is professor and chief of the Division of Hospital Medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. “Hopefully, this will lead to academicians across the world being interested in submitting their scholarly work.”
JHM‘s top-cited source is Core Competencies in Hospital Medicine: A Framework for Curriculum Development, a supplement published with Volume 1, Issue 1. The supplement’s clinical content is an essential tool for practicing hospitalists, providing guidance in the areas of clinical conditions, procedures, healthcare systems, development and methodologies.
“SHM is very proud of our journal, JHM, and getting such a sterling impact factor is a further acknowledgement of JHM’s credibility, reach, and world-class content,” says Larry Wellikson, MD, FHM, CEO of SHM.
