Metabolomics special issue from 2009

January 04, 2012, 06:05:31 AM

The “environmental metabolomics” special issue of the journal Metabolomics is now nearly three years old. As a result, it’s now possible to use its citation data to compare it to the citation rate of all papers in the journal – which is, of course, basically the same thing as impact factor. Why do this? Well, there isn’t any specific need, of course – but it’s interesting to see if environmental papers are the poor relation of the metabolomics world, given that environmental journals in general have relatively low impact factors compared to biomedical journals.

So, without further introduction, here are the results (all data taken from Thomson Reuters Web of Science, corrections and editorials excluded). The equivalent “impact factor” for the journal based on all papers from 2009 is 4.2. [“Impact factor” = total cites in 2010 + 2011, divided by 2 x the number of papers in 2009.] For papers from the environmental special issue only, it’s 6.4; and for all other papers from 2009, it’s 3.4. Of course, reviews tend to be more highly cited than primary research papers, and so can distort results. With reviews excluded, the “impact factor” for the special issue is 5.1, which still compares very favourably with all other papers (2.9, with reviews excluded).

What should we conclude from this? Not much, I would suggest! Firstly, we are not making direct comparisons (for instance, the special issue papers were published in the first issue of 2009 and so have had longer to be cited; and there are several other reasons why it’s not so simple to compare between sub-fields – listing these will be left as an exercise for the reader). Secondly, we have only a small sample set: 12 papers in the special issue, and only 42 papers in Metabolomics in total in 2009. But I do suggest that it possibly shows a healthy interest in environmental metabolomics, which may be encouraging to those working in the field.

Metabolomics special issue from 2009

Reply #1 – January 04, 2012, 06:10:21 AM

This is both an interesting and encouraging calculation for the environmental scientists!