The Lancet has overtaken the New England Journal of Medicine as the medical journal with the highest impact factor, according to Clarivate’s 2022 update to its Journal Citation Reports. And the jump wasn’t subtle: The Lancet’s impact factor – a controversial measure of how often a journal’s papers are cited on average – more than doubled from last year.
Lancet can thank the COVID-19 pandemic for its surge.
In separate news, Clarivate suppressed three journals for self-citation, and warned a half dozen others.
As we’ve written in posts on previous years’ reports:
Given many universities’ reliance on journal rankings to judge researchers’ work as part of tenure and promotion decisions, Clarivate’s suppression of a journal — meaning denying it an Impact Factor — can have far-reaching effects. Impact Factors are based on average citations to articles in a journal over a particular period of time. Many, including us, have argued that Impact Factor is not the best way to judge research — for reasons including relative ease of gaming such metrics.
NEJM had been the top-ranked journal in the general and internal medicine category since Clarivate’s first citation report 45 years ago, the analytics company’s press release about the report stated.
Lancet‘s impact factor increased from 79.3 in last year’s report to 202.7. NEJM’s impact factor nearly doubled as well, from 91.2 to 176.1.
Five other journals also had impact factors greater than 100 for the first time, and also published a lot of COVID-19 research: the Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet Respiratory Medicine, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, Nature Reviews Immunology, and Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology.
Three of the top ten most-cited scientific papers of 2021 appeared in Lancet, all of them about COVID-19.
We asked Phil Davis, a bibliometrics researcher and consultant, to contextualize Lancet’s move to the top for us. He said:
No discovery or invention in the history of science can come close to the effect COVID-19 papers had on the citation record in 2021. However, because the Impact Factor is so sensitive to highly cited papers, some journal scores will reach stratospheric heights this year, only to collapse next year. Unfortunately, this super-charged cycle of boom and bust is only going to fuel a greater sense of skepticism around the meaning and interpretation of the Impact Factor.
Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of the journal , told us he didn’t want to comment without more information from the published report.
NEJM’s editor-in-chief Eric Rubin did not respond to our request for comment, nor did the journal’s media relations team.
Clarivate suppresses journals from its report, meaning it doesn’t give them impact factors, if it identifies “anomalous citation behavior” that could distort the impact factor, such as excessive self-citation or citation stacking, which is sometimes called participating in “citation cartels” or “citation rings.” This year Clarivate suppressed three journals from its report for self-citation, fewer than the 10 suppressed last year and the 33 in 2020.
These are the three suppressed journals, out of more than 21,000 in the report:
- Chinese Journal of Organic Chemistry (Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
- Connection Science (Taylor & Francis)
- Indian Journal of Microbiology (Springer Nature)
We reached out to the suppressed journals for comment and haven’t heard back.
The editorial integrity team at Clarivate this year defined a new type of citation behavior that could distort impact factors they call “self stacking,” in which “the journal contains one or more documents with citations that are highly concentrated to the JIF numerator of the title itself.” Since this was the first year they defined the term, they issued warnings to the six journals identified as self stacking citations instead of suppressing them.
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Note exactly clear what the difference between ’self-stacking’ and ‘self-citation.’ Either way, for only suppressing 3 journals out of thousands, not much for gamy journals to worry about.
Lancet 202.731 IF is mostly due to their penchant for publishing half-baked Covid paper-like products. IF factor simply counting citations doesn’t reflect the reality of the explosive growth of journals and publications of dubious quality. What we have here is the worldwide application of Mediocrity Principle to once elite enterprise, which was scientific research.
Leio os dois ,lancet diariamente eNJM toda quarta a noite ,,mas são fracos comparados há Natura Science PNAS jornal elife ebiomedcine e PLOS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
Your first sentence should specify that you mean general medical journal, since the oncology journal CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians still holds the top spot among medical journals with an Impact Factor of 286.130.
A lot of journals increased their IFs, even journals that probably did not publish much COVID stuff. It does seem possible that the ludicrous growth of MDPI published articles, mostly because of reduced standards (see resignation of 10 editors from “Nutrition” a couple of years ago, plus the average time to publication for almost ALL their journals becoming strangely all very short) might be affecting this, directly or indirectly.
I think the IFs are unfortunately becoming less and less useful, especially by publishers (particularly MDPI but possibly others) who get around the “self citations” by getting reviewers to suggest other MDPI journals to cite. Was a reviewer for one of their journals, the article was garbage, and said so in the review, but then the journal comes back with other “reviewers” whose reviews were clearly also meant to try to influence me to change my mind. Including getting the authors to add at least 5 MDPI papers from different journals (some of which were completely irrelevant to the subject matter) to get around the “self citation” issue. This reviewer was obviously fake, because they actually referred to altering a figure that was not in the manuscript at all (and totally unrelated to the topic). So they couldn’t even cut and paste the fake reviewer’s reviews properly.
HF, please send details of this to [email protected] mentioning that this should be referred to me (Matt Hodgkinson, COPE Council member and member of the membership subcommittee). Your comments will be kept confidential.
Its really very great to surpass the world ‘s top most medical journal NEJM and become number one in the world. Hearty congratulations to team Lancet. Hope that the team Lancet would be successful in sustaning the this number one position in future also.
That is very clear
Particularly in the COVID
I think the lancet editorial board was wise in handling corona issues
They were ot affected by political or social pressure to give the facts as it is either we dislike it or not
Periods like COVID are real tests for institutional educational bodies integrity and reliability
“NEJM had been the top-ranked journal in the general and internal medicine category since Clarivate’s first citation report 45 years ago, the analytics company’s press release about the report stated. ”
This is wrong. 45 y ago there was no Clarivate metrics.
Shame on you forgetting the great ISI
The Lancet appears to be more focused on Global Health issues than NEJM. Moreover, most authors that publish in NEJM seem to come from the US. These may have had an impact on this change of IF values in favour of the Lancet. However, these two journals continue to be head and shoulders above the others.