Relative Strength of HighWire-affiliated Publishers in Life Sciences
(as measured by number of titles, articles, citations and average impact factors)
According to Eugene Garfield of the Institute for Scientific Information, more than 70% of all
citations in scientific literature are made to just 500 titles1.
These Top 500 titles can be sorted by subject and publisher to show the number of citations made
to each publisher in each subject area.
Of the Top 500 titles, 143 titles publish wholly or primarily in the field of Life Science.
This table also shows the proportion of articles and citations received by each publisher, and
the average impact factor of the publisher's Life Science titles.
Top Life Science Titles
(Based on data from ISI for 1999)
Titles
Articles
Cites
Impact
HighWire-affiliated Publishers
34%
42%
50%
11.780
Elsevier
22%
23%
18%
6.235
Academic Press
9%
10%
8%
3.253
Springer
6%
3%
2%
2.551
Wiley
6%
4%
3%
3.480
Blackwell
2%
2%
1%
3.890
all others
20%
16%
19%
5.908
Results for the field of Medicine are similar (though not shown here).
Notes on Measures of Journal Quality
The relative value of published research in peer-reviewed
journals is a matter of opinion. There are no direct
measures of the scientific importance of any given
research paper or journal title. Publishers and libraries
often use the number of titles published or held as
a measure of quality.
This method of measuring quality
is clearly inadequate, and leads to uninformed and
misguided collection development decisions. However,
there are three indirect measures of quality which can
be used to indicate, if not actually establish, the
importance of scientific literature.
Articles
The number of peer-reviewed articles published annually
is a direct measure of publishing volume, which indicates
in a general way the amount of author activity and reader
support generated by a particular title or group of titles.
Citations
The number of citations which a particular article or
journal receives is a measure of the influence exerted
and the interest generated by the published content.
Impact Factor
The impact factor is a statistic developed by the Institute
for Scientific Information to combine citations and articles
in a single measure of significance. The impact factor is a
ratio which indicates how frequently articles and titles are
cited. This measurement can give great importance to a
title even though it publishes relatively few articles.