Editorial

Biomedical research platforms and their infl uence on article submissions and journal rankings: An update. Giuseppe Lippi1, Emmanuel J Favaloro2, Ana-Maria Simundic3 1U.O. Diagnostica Ematochimica, Dipartimento di Patologia e Medicina di Laboratorio, Azienda Ospedaliero-Universitaria di Parma, Parma, Italy 2Department of Haematology, Institute of Clinical Pathology and Medical Research (ICPMR), Westmead Hospital, NSW, Australia 3University Department of Chemistry, Sestre Milosrdnice University Hospital Center, Zagreb, Croatia

*Corresponding author: [email protected]

Abstract After being indexed in 2006 in EMBASE/Excerpta Medica and , and later in Science Citation Index Expanded and Journal Citation Reports/ Science Edition citation databases, Biochemia Medica launched a new web page and online manuscript submission system in 2010, and celebrated its fi rst in the same year. Now, starting from the end of the 2011, the journal will also be indexed in PubMed/Medline, and this will contribute to increase the journal’s exposure and accessibility worldwide. This is an important breakthrough, which is expected to further increase the popularity of the journal, as well as the submission rate and citations. Although several tools are currently available as Web resources to retrieve scientifi c articles, whose functioning and basic criteria are thought to be rather similar, the functionality, coverage, notoriety and prominence may diff er widely. The recent indexing ofBiochemia Medica in PubMed/Medline has thereby given us the opportunity to provide a timely update on bio- medical research platforms, their relationship with article submissions and journal rankings. Key words: impact factor; indexing; Medline

Received: January 9, 2012 Accepted: January 21, 2012

Background After initially being indexed in 2006 in EMBASE/ portunity to provide an update on biomedical re- Excerpta Medica and Scopus (1), and later in Sci- search platforms and their relationship with article ence Citation Index Expanded and Journal Citation submissions and journal rankings. Reports/Science Edition citation databases (2), Bio- chemia Medica launched a new web page and on- Biomedical research platforms line manuscript submission system in 2010 (3), and celebrated its fi rst Impact Factor in the same year Several tools are currently available as Web re- (4). Beginning November 23, 2011 Biochemia Medi- sources to retrieve scientifi c articles. Although the ca is now also indexed in PubMed/Medline, and basic concepts underlying the diff erent biomedi- this will contribute to increase the journal’s expo- cal research platforms are similar, the functionality, sure and accessibility worldwide. This is expected coverage, notoriety and prominence may diff er to further increase the journal’s Impact Factor val- widely (Table 1). Some of the most representative ue, which last year remarkably increased from will be briefl y discussed in the following section. 0.660 to 1.085, whilst those of most other labora- tory medicine journals has instead declined (5). PubMed/Medline The above factors represent major breakthroughs PubMed, conventionally known also as “Medline”, for Biochemia Medica, and have provided the op- contains so far more than 21 million citations for

Biochemia Medica 2012;22(1):7–14 7 Lippi G. et al. Biomedical research platforms and their infl uence on article submissions and journal rankings

TABLE 1. List of medical and scientifi c search engines. authors’ name (author’s last name plus initials List of medical and scientifi c search engines without punctuation) and and/or journals (journal name or abbreviation). The special Clinical Study PubMed/MEDLINE. Available at: -d http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubme Categories search fi lters are useful to limit retrieval ISI . Available at: to citations of articles reporting studies carried out - https://www.isiknowledge.com with specifi c methodologies (e.g., applied clinical Scopus SciVerse. Available at: -s http://www.info.sciverse.com/scopu research). Citations are fi rst shown as 20 items per Google Scholar. Available at: page, the most recently entered citations being -/ http://scholar.google.it ranked fi rst. The output of the search is initially dis- Journal / Author Name Estimator (JANE). Available at: played in a summary format, but by clicking on the -/ http://www.biosemantics.org/jane title of the article the abstract can be visualized, Unbound MEDLINE. Available at: -m http://www.unboundmedicine.com/medline/eb when this is available. Moreover, although the Medscape. Available at: search result in most cases does not include the -m. http://www.medscape.co full text of the journal article (exceptions are free BioMed Central. Available at: full text articles available in PubMed Central), the -m. http://www.biomedcentral.co abstract display of the citation usually provides a Bibli Med. Available at: link to the full text, typically from the publisher’s -r http://biblimed.f web site. The Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) is Pubfocus. Available at: -m. http://pubfocus.co the NLM controlled vocabulary thesaurus used for PubGet. Available at: indexing PubMed citations, which can also be -m http://pubget.co used to fi nd terms such as subheadings, publica- Scientifi c Electronic Library. Available at: tion types, supplementary Concepts and pharma- -p http://www.scielo.org/php/index.ph cological actions. The search result can also be or- Highwire. Available at: dered according to specifi c parameters such as -/ http://highwire.org date of publication, relevance, authors, source title and type of article. To comply with the increasing biomedical literature from Medline, life science diff usion of medical and scientifi c applications for journals as well as online books. PubMed is man- smartphones (6), the PubMed text version is also aged by the U.S. National Library of Medicine designed to work with a variety of handheld, Palm (NLM), which is the world’s largest medical library. Powered and Pocket PC handheld computers. In PubMed provides access to bibliographic informa- particular, PubMed Mobile has the same search tion that includes Medline citations (a database functionality and content as the typical Web ver- that contains citations from the late 1940s to the sion and all search terms and fi elds work identical- present, with additional older material), as well as ly. Interestingly, daily HTML feeds can also be easily articles on plate tectonics or astrophysics from cer- set up with specifi c MeSH or keywords. PubMed tain Medline journals (usually general science and has also an interesting “spin-off ”, i.e., Pubfocus, chemistry journals, for which the life sciences arti- which performs statistical analysis of the PubMed/ cles are indexed for Medline), citations made avail- Medline searches enriched with additional infor- able before the date that the journal was selected mation, gathered from journal rank database and for indexing as well as additional life science jour- forward referencing database. nals that submit full text to PubMed Central and receive a qualitative review by NLM. Basically, cita- ISI Web of Science tions may include links to full-text content also Thomson Reuters (formerly Institute for Scientifi c from PubMed Central and publisher web sites. Information - ISI) Web of Knowledge is a premier Once the key concepts for the search have been research platform for information in the sciences, identifi ed, these can be entered in the search box social sciences, arts, and humanities. The specifi c as a general medical query, one or more keywords, subsection “Web of Science” provides researchers,

Biochemia Medica 2012;22(1):7–14 8 Lippi G. et al. Biomedical research platforms and their infl uence on article submissions and journal rankings administrators, faculty, and students with quick, other library resources, an author Identifi er to au- powerful access to the world’s leading citation da- tomatically match an author’s published research tabases, covering over 10,000 of the highest im- including the h-index, a citation tracker to simply pact journals worldwide, including fi nd citations in real-time and HTML feeds. The ba- journals and over 110,000 conference proceedings. sic search can be carried out directly from the Current and retrospective coverage in the scienc- homepage, whereas the advanced search uses es, social sciences, arts, and humanities are cov- Boolean operators for title, abstract, author key- ered since the 1900s. The most useful search fi elds word, index keywords and author fi elds. The re- include topic, titles, authors, researcher ID, publi- sults are displayed in a tabular format that can be cation name, and document type. The search out- easily sorted according to various parameters (e.g., put is fi rst shown as an abbreviated record format, date, relevance, authors, source title and number including at the top of the page the selected time- of citations) and contains additional information span and any selected data restrictions such as besides those available in other scientifi c search document types and languages. Additional inter- engines such as h-index and citations to the mate- esting tools include the “citing articles count” (i.e., rial retrieved. Likewise Pubed/Medline, an iPhone the total number of citations for all citation data- application of Scopus SciVerse is also available. bases and all years in the all databases search func- tion in Web of Science or BIOSIS Citation Index), Google Scholar and “cited articles” (which is a list of all documents This completely free search engine provides a very cited by the article whose title appears at the top simple mean - possibly the easiest among all re- of the page and that can then be displayed by di- search platforms - to broadly access scholarly and rectly clicking on them). There is also a link availa- biomedical literature. A huge number of disci- ble that displays the abstract of the record in a plines can be searched, including articles, theses, scrolling box. At variance with PubMed, Web of books, abstracts and court opinions, from a variety Science is not free and can hence be accessed only of sources such as academic publishers, profes- via institution’s remote access proxy, Athens au- sional societies, online repositories, universities thentication or signing in with Web of Knowledge and other websites. The result of the search does username and password. not provide a direct access of the material (e.g., an article), which can however be further accessed Scopus SciVerse through libraries or alternative web resources such As stated in the offi cial website, launched in No- as the journal’s or publisher’s web site. The docu- vember 2004, SciVerse Scopus is one of the largest ments retrieved are ranked weighing the full text, abstract and citation databases of peer-reviewed where it was published, by who it was written, as literature and quality web sources worldwide. The well as how often and how recently it has been cit- database, which requires Athens or other Institu- ed in other scholarly literature (Google Scholar tion login to fully benefi t from the content, cur- sources). When multiple versions of a document rently contains 46 million records (25 million with are indexed, the full and authoritative text from references back to 1996, 21 million records pre- the publisher is selected as the primary version. 1996 which go back as far as 1823, as well as 4.8 There is also a strict collaboration with the publish- million conference papers from proceedings and ers, to maintain control over access to the content journals), 70% of which contain abstracts, covering of the document. nearly 19,500 titles (i.e., 18,500 peer-reviewed jour- nals including 1,800 Open Access journals, 425 Journal / Author Name Estimator (JANE) trade publications, 325 book series and 250 con- The Journal / Author Name Estimator (JANE) is a ference proceedings) from 5,000 publishers. The peculiar but very useful research platform, with database also provides full Medline coverage. The less coverage but several appealing features for functionality of the database includes a simple and scientists. JANE uses the open source search en- intuitive interface, the link to full-text articles and gine Lucene. The keywords that can be introduced,

Biochemia Medica 2012;22(1):7–14 9 Lippi G. et al. Biomedical research platforms and their infl uence on article submissions and journal rankings which include titles and/or abstracts of the articles, number of citations in 2010 to items are parsed using the MoreLikeThis parser class. The published in the journal in 2009 and 2008 / engine fi rst searches for the 50 articles that are number of items published in the most similar to what has been input. For each of same journal in 2009 and 2008. these articles, a similarity score between that arti- Currently, the higher a journal’s Impact Factor, the cle and the text to be searched is calculated. The more infl uential that journal is considered to be. similarity scores of all articles belonging to a cer- tain journal or author are then summed to calcu- There are, however, several limitations to all of the late the “confi dence” score for that journal or au- searchable databases as well as any of the ‘quality’ thor and the fi nal results are classifi ed according to metrics used, including the Impact Factor (Table 2) this index. All journals indexed in Medline are in- (8,9). cluded, although those for which no entry was found in Medline in the last year are not shown. All TABLE 2. Top 10 limitations to searchable databases and ‘qual- authors that have published Medline articles over ity’ metrics such as the Impact Factor. the past 10 years are also included in Jane. Only Top 10 limitations to searchable databases and ‘quality’ regular articles are displayed, i.e., full articles, short metrics such as the Impact Factor communication and reviews, whereas comments, 1. Accessibility of database, availability of journals and editorials, historical articles, congresses, practice journal listing bias. guidelines are excluded. After entering the text of 2. Inference, not always valid, that high citation rates refl ect the title or the abstract of an article, JANE is very the ‘high quality’ of an article. 3. Inference, not always valid, that a high IF refl ects helpful in ascertaining whether similar articles are generalized high citation rates or generalized ‘high quality’ already published in Medline and, eventually, for the journal. which is the most appropriate journal to submit 4. Citation bias (self citations from journals and authors). the work. 5. Citations have equal ranking. 6. Specialty bias for Impact Factor. 7. Date of publication bias. Impact factor: the good, the bad and the 8. High quality articles, and high quality journals, directed ugly! at end-users or medical and scientifi c practitioners, rather than researchers per se, may have low Impact Factors. The concept of using citations to gauge the impor- 9. The impact factor is calculated over a relatively short period of time (two years), whereas the life of published tance of journal is not new, since it was originally papers is much longer than this (10 or more years). conceived by Eugene Garfi eld in 1955, and further 10. The Impact Factor is very easy to manipulate and defi ned as “Impact Factor” (7). Five years later, Gar- artifi cially infl ate. fi eld himself funded the ISI (i.e., Institute for Scien- tifi c Information), which is now managed by Thom- son Reuters. The basic concept underlining the im- First, there is the accessibility of the databases, the portance of the Impact Factor is that articles that availability of the journals and individual journal are highly cited by other articles may be consid- listing biases. The least accessible database is the ered more important than those that are scarcely Thomson Reuters (formerly ISI) Web of Science. cited. To prevent the bias of time in the estimation Journals may require subscriptions or charge an of this measure, the Impact Factor is thereby calcu- article access fee. Only journals listed in each spe- lated using two particular elements, namely (i) the cifi c database are included in each analysis. For ex- number of citations in the current year to items ample, for Scopus (which is managed by ), published in the previous two years at the numer- there is a possible publisher bias; for the Web of ator and (ii) the number of substantive publica- Science, database listings strongly favor English tions in the same two years at the denominator. language journals and primarily those published The 2010 Impact Factor of a certain journal will in the U.S.; other databases would have similar re- hence be calculated as follows: strictions and possible biases.

Biochemia Medica 2012;22(1):7–14 10 Lippi G. et al. Biomedical research platforms and their infl uence on article submissions and journal rankings

Second, the concept that high citation rates refl ect though considered an important aspect of usage, the ‘high quality’ of an article is not always valid. the Impact Factor only refl ects a very small level of Although probably true in most cases, an article journal and article usage or utility (8). Indeed, this may have a high citation rate due to ongoing cita- becomes rather striking when undertaking any tion of some scientifi c fl aw. diff erential analysis of papers published within a Third, there is the inference that a high Impact Fac- journal and refl ecting on citation rates contribut- tor refl ects generalized high citation rates or gener- ing to the journal’s Impact Factor versus the popular- alized ‘high quality’ for the journal, and again this ity of articles as identifi ed by online downloads. Rath- may not be valid. In fact, a journal’s Impact Factor er simply, the separate listings contain some articles refl ects each journal article’s citation pattern, and which appear in both, but most articles appearing in . there exists a wide range of citation patterns for dif- one list do not appear in the other (10,11) ferent articles published within any given journal. Ninth, the Impact Factor is calculated over a rela- Also, article citation rates determine the journal’s tively short period of time (two years), whereas the Impact Factor, not the other way around. life of published papers is much longer (10 or more Fourth, there are possible citation biases evident, years). Indeed, some papers have very long cita- as there are no correction factors applied against tion lives, whereas others have very short citation the infl uence of self-citation in Impact Factor cal- lives (8,12). The Impact factor favors the latter. culations, and both authors and journals may favor Tenth, the Impact Factor is very easy to manipulate self-citation. and artifi cially infl ate (13). One of the peculiarities Fifth, all citations have equal ranking, and there is of the Impact Factor is that the metric contains a no adjustment for where citations appear. There- numerator and a denominator, which do not nec- fore, a citation from a ‘low impact’ journal is count- essarily include the same article type. Therefore, a ed equally to a citation from a ‘high impact’ journal. journal may publish many “Letters to the Editor” or “Editorials” with these being citable, or with cita- Sixth, there is a specialty bias to consider – Impact tions within them counting towards the Impact Fac- Factors diff er according to the research or special- tor of other articles, but these may not be counted ty fi eld. It is thereby less generally valid to compare as items (not a ‘substantive publication’) for inclu- Impact Factors between journals from diff erent sion in the denominator. In essence, this may achieve specialty fi elds. a high number of citable articles within a journal, Seventh, the date of publication issues infl uences without that same journal appearing to publish a the “citability” of any given paper; i.e. papers pub- high number of substantive publications. lished at the beginning of the year contribute to Other drawbacks in the use of the Impact Factor is Impact Factor calculations more than those pub- for assigning resources (human or economical) by lished at the end of the year because they are in grant-funding bodies, or for measuring (and com- press for a longer period of time. paring) the success of scientists, despite the fact Eighth, some high quality articles, and high quality that it has been specifi cally designed for journals journals, are directed at end-users or medical and and not for individual articles or scientists (14,15). scientifi c practitioners, rather than researchers per se. These end-user directed papers from such jour- The relationship between biomedical nals may have low citation rates and thus low Im- research platforms, article submissions pact Factor values (i.e., educational reviews or oth- er papers aimed at medical and/or laboratory and journal citations practitioners rather than scientifi c researchers will The choice of one search engine rather than an- be cited less frequently in future publications and other may be infl uenced by a variety of (mostly) therefore will not contribute to the journal’s Im- personal factors, e.g., the more familiarity with one pact Factor – in fact they will likely act to reduce system than with another, the personal or institu- the journal’s Impact Factor although these should tional accessibility to research platforms with lim- still be considered very important items). Thus, al-

Biochemia Medica 2012;22(1):7–14 11 Lippi G. et al. Biomedical research platforms and their infl uence on article submissions and journal rankings

ited access, customizable performances and out- TABLE 3. Leading factors associated with a higher Impact Factor. put, as well as the graphic layout. Several studies Leading factors associated with a higher Impact Factor were carried out to assess which among the diff er- ent biomedical research platforms performs bet- • Widespread availability on the Web in electronic format. • Indexing in the most popular, prominent and accessed ters in terms of search output by using objective biomedical research platforms (e.g., PubMed/MEDLINE, criteria. When Markus compared the four most Scopus and Google Scholar). popular search engines (i.e., PubMed/Medline, • English language of publication of the items. SciVerse/ScienceDirect, Scopus and Google Schol- • Availability of (free) full text articles on-line. ar to assess which is most eff ective for literature re- • Availability of abstract or summary on-line. search according to three performance criteria (i.e., • Submission from authors with high reputation. recall, precision and importance), the search fea- • Publication of a high number of review articles. tures provided by PubMed/Medline were reported to be exceptional as compared with the other plat- Scientists have thereby become accustomed for forms (16). Similar results were obtained by Anders more than a decade to use Medline (now PubMed, and Evans, who found that PubMed/Medline available to the public since 1995) for retrieving in- searches with clinical queries fi lter were more pre- formation, which has been the only reliable source cise than with the Advanced Search in Google along with in EMBASE/Excerpta Medica until new Scholar. The authors also concluded that PubMed/ tools such as Scopus SciVerse and Google Scholar Medline seems more practical to conduct effi cient, have become available at the dawn of the new mil- valid searches, for informing evidence-based pa- lennium (19). Although the prediction of citation tient-care protocols, for guiding the care of indi- would require nothing less than an effi cient crystal vidual patients, as well as for educational purpos- ball due to the nature and dynamics of citations es, whereas Google Scholar can only be consid- (20), it has already been demonstrated that e-pub- ered an adjunct resource, for initial searches to lishing increases substantially the citations, espe- quickly fi nd a signifi cant item (17). Although cially when the papers are freely available on the PubMed/Medline searches yielded fewer total ci- web (21), and journals may therefore further in- tations than Google Scholar according to Freeman crease their Impact Factor by electronic publication et al., the former search engine appeared however of contents. Interestingly, Curti et al. carried out a more specifi c than the latter for locating relevant retrospective study to verify whether the impact primary literature articles (18). factor of a specifi c journal may be related to the There are several factors that might contribute to amount of information available through the Web, the success of a journal, where this success is ex- and found that the presence of the Table of Content pressed in terms of citations and thereby Impact (TOC), abstract and full text on the Internet was sig- Factor (Table 3). It is perhaps obvious that the wid- nifi cantly associated with higher impact factor, even er the journal coverage, the higher the chance that after accounting for time and subject category (22). its articles become available to a broader audi- Similar results were reported by Mueller (23) and ence, which could thereby read and then cite Murali (24), who observed that journals available as them. As with most aspects of life, in science, it is full text on the Web had higher median Impact Fac- not so easy to change habits. Several decades ago, tors than those whose full text was unavailable. the only handy system for gathering biomedical Moreover, journals that became at least partially information was represented by going to a medi- available online had signifi cant increases in median cal library, consulting the heavy tomes of Index Impact Factors from over 12 years. For example, fi ve Medicus, fi nding the journal articles most repre- Brazilian journals that had been indexed by ISI for at sentative of that topic in the library shelves and fi - least fi ve years and available in SciELO for at least nally photocopying this material for later use. The two more than doubled their Impact Factors since greatest breakthrough has therefore been repre- inclusion in the latter database (25). sented by the Internet, beginning as soon as re- Another important issue that aff ects the citation search engines became available for that platform. rate is the language of publication, especially for

Biochemia Medica 2012;22(1):7–14 12 Lippi G. et al. Biomedical research platforms and their infl uence on article submissions and journal rankings journal such as Biochemia Medica, which now ac- crease were the better international visibility, full cepts and publishes only manuscripts in the Eng- text free-of-charge online availability, along with lish language, accompanied by abstract in Croatian the larger number of international contributions (3). For example, Mueller et al. reported that Eng- (29). Since authors with high reputation, who dis- lish-language journals have a greater mean Impact proportionately receive more citations than lesser- Factor than non-English journals and U.S. journals known authors, tend to submit their articles to have a signifi cantly greater impact factor than high-Impact Factor, Medline-Indexed journals, it is journals from other Countries, even though the inconceivable that these two requisites fundamen- mean Impact Factor of English-language U.S. jour- tally infl uence journal rankings. A fi nal, well recog- nals does not diff er from that of English-language nized factor that contributes to greatly increase ci- journals from outside the U.S. (26). tations and thereby Impact Factor of individual As regards the number of submissions, it is under- journals is publication of large numbers of reviews standable that authors tend to submit more arti- rather than original articles, since reviews typically cles to journals that are indexed in international receive higher numbers of citations (30). databases. According to the always valid maxima “..it is better to be looked over than overlooked”, the Conclusions “state of uncitedness” can dramatically decrease the number of contributions submitted to a jour- Despite a very poor evolution since the 1996, nal (27). Blank et al. carried out an original research, PubMed/Medline is still probably one of the pre- aimed at assessing the impact of SciELO and ferred source for scientists, physicians, medical Medline indexing on the number of articles sub- students and academics, accounting for by over mitted to the “Jornal de Pediatria”. The data was 3.5 million searches per day, i.e., 40 per second. Al- clustered in four periods, stage I (pre-journal web- though Web of Science is probably the single most site availability); II (journal website availability); III used database by U.S. science researchers (i.e., (SciELO indexing) and IV (Medline indexing). A sig- 42%), PubMed/MEDLINE is at the second place nifi cant trend increase in the number of submis- (22%) and - even more interestingly - is the pre- sions, especially from foreign countries, was ob- ferred tool for biologists (39%), ahead of Web of served throughout the study period, with the Science (35%) and Google Scholar (18%) (31). At number of manuscripts submitted rising from 184 variance with other search engines, PubMed/ in stage I, 240 in stage II, 297 in stage III, to 482 in Medline (along with Google Scholar) can be ac- stage IV (28). The combination of higher interna- cessed for free and off ers optimal update frequen- tional visibility and foreign submissions is particu- cy, including online early articles. Globally, Google larly eff ective in increasing the citations rate, as re- Scholar and Scopus/SciVerse provide more cover- cently emphasized for by Kovacic and Misak for age than Web of Science and PubMed/MEDLINE, another Croatian journal. The authors calculated but they also yield results of inconsistent accuracy the Impact Factor of the Croatian Medical Journal (32). Therefore, PubMed is still probably the bench- (CMJ) including the years before indexing into the mark in biomedical electronic research and, in- ISI database, and found that the Impact Factor val- deed, Biochemia Medica will without doubt benefi t ue nearly doubled over that period. It is notewor- from being indexed in this infl uential research thy that the leading factors accounting for the in- platform.

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Biomedicinske istraživačke platforme i njihov odnos s brojem zaprimljenih članaka i vrednovanje kvalitete časopisa Sažetak Nakon što je Biochemia Medica prihvaćena za indeksiranje u citatnim bazama EMBASE/Excerpta Medica i Scopus, a potom i u Science Citation Index Expanded i Journal Citation Reports/Science Edition 2006. godine, Časopis 2010. godine pokreće i novu mrežnu stranicu i on-line sustav za prihvaćanje i obradu članaka. Iste je godine Časopis proslavio i svoj prvi čimbenik utjecaja (engl. impact factor, IF). Krajem 2011. Časopis je uvršten u citatnu bazu PubMed/Medline što će pridonijeti njegovoj povećanoj vidljivosti i omogućiti pristup čitateljima diljem svijeta. Ovo je značajno dostignuće, koje će najvjerojatnije uvjetovati porast popularnosti časopisa, broja zaprimljenih članaka i broja citata. Trenutno je dostupno nekoliko mrežnih alata za pretraživanje znanstvenih publikacija, čija se operativnost i temeljne značajke ne razlikuju mno- go, međutim njihova se funkcionalnost, opseg publikacija, zastupljenost i popularnost mogu značajno razlikovati. Nedavno prihvaćanje Časopisa Biochemia Medica za indeksiranje u bazi PubMed/Medline je prilika da čitateljstvo upoznamo s postojećim biomedicinskim istraživačkim platfor- mama, te o tome kako se oni odnose s brojem zaprimljenih članaka i vrednovanju kvalitete časopisa. Ključne riječi: čimbenik utjecaja; indeksiranje; Medline

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