The BJGP’s Impact Factor is now 3.261, the highest it has ever been and the second highest of all primary care journals. A journal’s Impact Factor is a measure of the average number of times that research papers (editorials, discussion and clinical articles are excluded from the calculation) have been cited by other journals in a 2-year period, in this case 2016 and 2017, divided by the number of ‘citable’ papers published in the journal over the same period. Although the Impact Factor is a magic number that editors await with bated breath every summer, it does not tell anything like the whole story of the relevance of a journal or the true significance and influence of individual papers published in it. Many journal metrics, including the Impact Factor, have been devised or are owned by journal publishers, and can be manipulated, and there …