JIF notes 2016

If it’s late June, it must be time for the latest Journal Impact Factors to be announced. (Last year’s notes are here.)

Nature Neuroscience is confirming its dominance over Neuron with upward and downward trends, respectively, widening the gap.

Biological Psychiatry continues to skyrocket, up to 11.2. All pretensions from Neuropsychopharmacology to keep pace are over, third straight year of declines for the ACNP journal lands it at 6.4. Looks like the 2011-2012 inflation was simply unsustainable for NPP. BP is getting it done though. No sign of a letup for the past 4 years. Nicely done BP and any of y’all who happen to have published there in the past half-decade.

I’ve been taking whacks at the Journal of Neuroscience all year so I almost feel like this is pile-on. But the long steady trend has dropped it below a 6, listed at 5.9 this year. Oy vey.

Looks like Addiction Biology has finally overreached with their JIF strategy. It jumped up to the 5.9 level 2012-2013 but couldn’t sustain it- two consecutive years of declines lowers it to 4.5. Even worse, it has surrendered the top slot in the Substance Abuse category. As we know, this particular journal maintains an insanely long pre-print queue with some papers being assigned to print two whole calendar years after appearing online. Will anyone put up with this anymore, now that the JIF is declining and it isn’t even the best-in-category anymore? I think this is not good for AB.

A number of journals in the JIF 4-6 category that I follow are holding steady over the past several years, that’s good to see.

Probably the most striking observation is what appears to be a relatively consistent downward trend for JIF 2-4 journals that I watch. These were JIFs that have generally trended upward (slowly, slowly) from 2006 or so until the past couple of years. I assumed this was a reflection of more scientific articles being published and therefore more citations available. Perhaps this deflationary period is temporary. Or perhaps it reflects journals that I follow not keeping up with the times in terms of content?

As always, interested to hear what is going on with the journals in the fields you follow, folks. Have at it in the comments.