International Journal of Cardiovascular Sciences. 12/mar/2024;37:e20240003.

Selecting a Journal for Publication: Should Impact Factor be the Primary Criterion to Consider?

Marcella dos Santos Lopes da Silva , Claudio Tinoco Mesquita

DOI: 10.36660/ijcs.20240003

The first scientific journal published with peer review was the “Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London,” published by the Royal Society of London in 1665. The journal was founded by Henry Oldenburg, who was the first secretary of the Royal Society. Peer review was a significant advancement in scientific method, as it involves the evaluation of articles by independent experts invited by the journal’s editorial board, ensuring that they are reviewed before publication. The goal of peer review is to assess whether that the articles are of high quality and the presented information is accurate, easily interpretable, and reliable.

Every scientist is confronted with the decision of choosing the most suitable venue to submit their findings for publication. For this purpose, authors tend to look for journals with greater visibility to ensure that their research will be widely recognized and will have a positive impact on their academic careers. Among the various factors considered when deciding the best journal for publication, the Impact Factor (IF) is considered one of the most important. The IF was created by Eugene Garfield, the founder of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), in 1955. The IF reflects the influence of a scientific journal by calculating the ratio of the number of citations received by a journal in a year to the number of articles published by the journal in the previous two years. In general, the more frequently an article from a journal is cited by other scientists, the more important it is to the scientific community, and the more relevant the journal is. Thus the IF helps scientists and other professionals dealing with scientific information to assess the importance of a scientific journal… A higher IF generally indicates that articles from a particular journal are cited more frequently, indicating its greater influence within the scientific community.

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