ULTRASONOGRAPHY: how to raise the impact factor

Since 2014, when we renamed the official journal of the Korean Society of Ultrasound in Medicine (KSUM), Ultrasonography has been published in English only with a full Open Access policy, and the number of citations of Ultrasonography articles by articles in other journals has increased [1]. All of the e-published articles in the “ahead-of-print” status as well as all officially issued articles are searchable in PubMed (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ pubmed?term=Ultrasonography[jour]), and the early indexing in PubMed has contributed to maximizing the span of time our articles appear to global readers. The impact factor (IF), reflecting the citation rate of the articles in a journal in a certain period of time, is generally used to validate a journal among the journals in the same field of interest. It is likely that most journal editors are concerned about increasing their journal’s IF. About 80 articles published in the first two years (2014-2015) of Ultrasonography were cited more than 200 times by the articles in the Web of Science Core Collection up through this November. When we estimated the citation rate of the 40 Ultrasonography articles published in 2014 using an IF calculation method similar to that used by the Journal Citation Reports (JCR), we found 73 citations from the Web of Science Core Collection articles published in 2015; and the citation rate was 1.825. From the official 2015 JCR (https://jcr. incites.thomsonreuters.com/), we found two journals having higher IFs (Ultraschall in der Medizin, IF=4.434; Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology, IF=2.298) than the citation rate of Ultrasonography in the field of general clinical ultrasound. Although the scale of coverage of the societies that sponsor these two journals, the European Federation of Societies for Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology (EFSUMB) and World Federation for Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology (WFUMB), is not comparable with KSUM, and the total number of published articles is more limited in Ultrasonography, we need to preserve or further increase the citation rate to achieve global name recognition. As a matter of fact, well-designed and well-written articles dealing with current popular topics tend to be more frequently cited than others, and such articles can be selected and qualified from a large pool of submitted articles. Toward this goal, a large number of Editor-in-Chief Ultrasonography https://doi.org/10.14366/usg.13047 pISSN: 2288-5919 • eISSN: 2288-5943 Ultrasonography 2017;36:1-2