Eagle-eyed readers of the BJGP will have spotted, towards the bottom of the adjacent panel containing editorial information about the Journal, the 2018 Impact Factor (IF), which now stands at 4.434. These four digits are music to my editorial years — yes I know, I should get out more — and mean that of all the primary medical care journals indexed in the various bibliometric databases, the BJGP has the highest journal IF in the world, overtaking our American colleagues at the Annals of Family Medicine.
The IF calculation is simple and, in a way, somewhat dispiriting. Our IF of 4.434 is derived from dividing the total number of citations in 2018 to research papers published in the Journal in 2016 and 2017 (878), by the number of papers published in the same period (198). The …