There are all sorts of flaws with using impact factors for judging the quality of biomedical research. Love them or hate them, just getting hold of impact factors for journals in bioinformatics and related fields is much harder than it should be, so I thought I’d reproduce some statistics I gathered here. The rankings, which you should use with caution [1,2], are correct as of June 2006 (and apply to citations in 2005) courtesy of Journal Citation Reports®, part of Thomson ISI Web of Knowledge. JCR has a pretty horrible clunky web interface when compared to some of its rivals [3,4], maybe one day they’ll make it better. Anyway, this is not a comprehensive list, just a fairly random selection of bioinformatics and computer science journals that publish articles I’ve been reading the last few years.
| Journal | ISI impact factor |
| Science | 30.927 |
| Cell | 29.431 |
| Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology | 29.852 |
| Nature | 29.273 |
| Nature Genetics | 25.797 |
| Nature Biotechnology | 22.378 |
| Nature Reviews Drug Discovery | 18.775 |
| PLOS Biology | 14.672 |
| PNAS | 10.231 |
| Genome Research | 10.139 |
| Genome Biology | 9.712 |
| Drug Discovery Today | 7.755 |
| Nucleic Acids Research | 7.552 |
| Bioessays | 6.787 |
| Plant Physiology | 6.114 |
| Bioinformatics (OUP) | 6.019 |
| BMC Bioinformatics | 4.958 |
| BMC Genomics | 4.092 |
| Proteins: structure, function and bioinformatics | 4.684 |
| IEEE Intelligent Systems | 2.560 |
| Journal of Computational Biology | 2.446 |
| Journal of Biomedical Informatics | 2.388 |
| IEEE Internet Computing | 2.304 |
| Artificial Intelligence in Medicine | 1.882 |
| Comparative and Functional Genomics | 0.992 |
| Concurrency and Computation: Practice and experience | 0.535 |
| Briefings in Bioinformatics (OUP) | not listed |
| PLOS Computational Biology | not listed |
| Journal of Web Semantics | not listed |
One point of interest, cheeky young upstart BioMed Central Bioinformatics (going since 2000) seems to be catching up on traditional old-school favourite OUP Bioinformatics (going since 1985), which as mentioned on nodalpoint, has been publishing some dodgy parser papers lately.
References
- Plos Medicine Editors (2006) The Impact Factor Game: It is time to find a better way to assess the scientific literature PLoS Medicine 3 (6), 291 (6 Jun 2006)
- Anon (2005) Not-so-deep impact. Research assessment rests too heavily on the inflated status of the impact factor. Nature. 435 (7045), 1003-4 (23 Jun 2005)
- Jim Giles (2005) Comparison of Google Scholar, Thomson ISI Web of Science and Scopus Citation Database from Elsevier Nature. 438 (7068), 554-5 (01 Dec 2005)
- Maksim V Plikus, Zina Zhang and Cheng-Ming Chuong (2006) PubFocus: semantic MEDLINE/PubMed citations analytics through integration of controlled biomedical dictionaries and ranking algorithm BMC bioinformatics 7:424
- Neil Saunders (2005) Impact factors discussion on nodalpoint
- This post originally published on nodalpoint with comments
O'Really? 
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