Neuroepidemiology increases impact factor.

Accessible online at: www.karger.com/ned This last issue of 2003 brings excellent news to the readers, editorial board, and publishers of Neuroepidemiology. According to the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), Neuroepidemiology increased its impact factor (IF) to 2.139 in 2002 from 1.390 in 2001. This culminates an upward 5-year trend that reflects the increasing quality of the work submitted for publication in this journal. The IF is considered a putative marker of journal quality [1]. A creation of Eugene Garfield, the founder of ISI, the IF was described in 1972 as a ratio between citations and citable items published in a particular period [2]. The numerator for this ratio is the number of all current year (2002) citations in the literature; the denominator is the number of citable items, i.e., articles published in the journal during the preceding two years (2000, 2001). Large-volume publications and review journals have the highest IFs, but from thousands of journals only a minority achieve an IF 13.0 [3]. Despite persistent [4] and sometimes vociferous criticisms of its role [5], the IF is associated with higher methodological quality of clinical research articles [6], often reflecting higher rejection rates. The latter are a measure of the quality control exerted by peer reviewers, deputy editors, and members of the editorial board. In the final analysis, this increase of Neuroepidemiology’s IF reflects the coming of age of this young discipline, with ramifications to all clinical subspecialties of neurology.