Veterinary Vertex
Veterinary Vertex is a weekly podcast that takes you behind the scenes of the clinical and research discoveries published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association (JAVMA) and the American Journal of Veterinary Research (AJVR). Tune in to learn about cutting-edge veterinary research and gain in-depth insights you won’t find anywhere else. Come away with knowledge you can put to use in your own practice – along with a healthy dose of inspiration to remind you what you love about veterinary medicine.
Veterinary Vertex
Demystifying Veterinary Journal Impact Factor and Enhancing Publication Reach
What truly drives the impact of a veterinary journal, and how can these publications rise in the ranks? Join us as we unpack the complexities of journal impact factors with Dr. Morna Conway. In this episode, Morna demystifies the calculation and significance of impact factors, emphasizing their role as lagging indicators. We scrutinize the recent impact factors for JAVMA and AJVR, delving into their rankings and the results of a recent readership and authorship survey. Discover how factors such as journal reach, speed to decision, and the fairness of peer review play crucial roles in authors' submission choices beyond just the impact factor.
Our conversation then shifts to transformative strategies for enhancing the reach and impact of veterinary journals, with a particular focus on AJVR. From adopting an open access model to publishing case reports and creating thematic virtual collections, we explore innovative methods to captivate a broader audience. We highlight the importance of real-time metrics like article downloads, social media engagement, and Altmetric scores as indicators of success. Lastly, we touch on the emotional journey of losing a beloved pet to nasal cancer and the unyielding commitment to advancing veterinary care that it inspires. This episode is a heartfelt celebration of the shared passion driving both pet parents and veterinary professionals to improve animal lives.
Open access article: https://doi.org/10.2460/javma.262.9.1146
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You're listening to Veterinary Vertex, a podcast of the AVMA Journals. In this episode we chat with our consultant, morna Conway.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Veterinary Vertex. I'm Editor-in-Chief Lisa Fortier, and I'm joined by Associate Editor Sarah Wright. Today we have my dear friend and colleague Morna joining us. Morna, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to be with us here today.
Speaker 3:My pleasure. Lisa and Sarah Delighted to be here.
Speaker 1:All right, let's dive into all things Impact Factor. So, Morna, first let's start with a little bit about you. Can you share with our listeners your professional background Can?
Speaker 3:you share with our listeners your professional background? Absolutely. I am an independent journal consultant working with nonprofit scientific and medical societies. I've been doing this for a good many years and I think the sort of thing that made me really get into this type of consulting, versus the sort of marketing consulting that I started out with years ago, was that I earned my PhD in higher education policy, planning and administration, and my particular topic was inter-organizational relationships, and it's been a joy to work with navigating the relationships that societies have with the many vendors, suppliers, partners, organizations that they rely on in order to get their journal programs really singing. So, for instance, we've always tried to cultivate relationships with Clarivate. The importance of a company like Clarivate Analytics, which manages the impact factor to AVMA, is, of course, the JAVMA and AGVR journals, which are both indexed by Web of Science, which is the source of the citations that Clarivate counts as they develop the impact factor.
Speaker 1:Well, we are super grateful to work with you, morna, so thank you for being a part of the team.
Speaker 3:My pleasure.
Speaker 1:So we keep mentioning impact factor. So what is journal impact factor?
Speaker 3:It's an odd little creature. It is the average number of citations that papers in the journal earn in a specific time frame. So, for instance, the current 2023 impact factor is the number of citations in 2023 divided. And citations are references.
Speaker 3:So a citation is when you write a paper and you say, ok, this was referenced in this other paper, and you quote the volume, the issue, the pages, the title, the authors, and so there's a sort of one of the building blocks of the scientific method, if you will, because we're always building on the work of others is basically those citations divided by the number of citable items in the prior two years, which would be 2022 and 2021 in this case. So the impact factor gives a little time for papers to be cited and referenced by other scientists and authors. It's not a very long time. So there are other measures which look at four-year impact factors, like the CITE score, which is an Elsevier product, and the five-year impact factor, which is a Clarivate product, but the one that's sort of the gold standard that everybody gets excited about is the two-year impact factor. So, again, citations in 2023 to articles published in 2022 and 2021. And so you can see right from there it's a lagging indicator. It's nothing very immediate about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks, maureen. I don't think most people understand that it lags, especially those who are using it, as to either choose where to publish an article, whether you're an author, or people who are evaluating dossiers you know leaders and other people who are looking and being like huh, I wonder what the impact factor is. So, yeah, great explanation. How did JABMA and AJVR fare in the 2023 impact factor report?
Speaker 3:to report. Javma earned an impact factor of 1.6 and AJVR 1.3. Javma was down a little bit from 1.9 the prior year. Ajvr was up 1.3 from the prior year. So there's a little bit of movement there. Both of them are in quartile two as compared with other journals in the veterinary sciences category. So what Clarivate does is say let's look at all the veterinary sciences journals, of which there are 167 in this year's index, and then they rank the journals by their impact factors. So JAVMA was 62nd and AJVR was 78th.
Speaker 2:Yeah, as you know, morna, because you're instrumental in it, we just did a readership and authorship survey, so we have an idea where veterinary authors at least the top five or 10 places they like to submit articles. How do JAVMA and HVR stack up against those journals, understanding that all veterinary journals have a pretty low impact factor in the grand scheme of impact factor?
Speaker 3:have a pretty low impact factor. In the grand scheme of impact factor yes, we're not the Lancet which is something like 100. I think we stacked out really well on some different variables. So we asked them what are the contributing factors to their decision? Impact factor was actually relatively unimportant. It was for Javma.
Speaker 3:The big thing was the reach of JAVMA, so the audience there is almost, or actually more than, 100,000 veterinarians in practice AJVR. There were things like the speed to decision, the low article processing charge because it is an open access journal and you know factors that were not necessary and I think the fairness of peer review and the fact that you no longer do very heavy copy editing, rewriting an author's papers. Those were all factors that don't play directly into impact factor but that do influence where authors choose to submit. So actually, when you looked at all of the results, impact factor was ranked about fourth or fifth for most journals. In some journals it was quite high, frontiers, for instance, which does rank up there a little bit higher than we are, but by and large, it's not clear that chasing impact factor is the major goal of veterinary sciences.
Speaker 2:Authors. Yeah, it's interesting that you just mentioned Frontiers. Frontiers and PLOS One. We often talk about them as mega journals, and how might that? What are some of the other differences within the low impact factors in general of veterinary journals? What?
Speaker 3:other things might make up some of these differences. Journals and their owners have different goals for themselves and for their journals. I think that if you're Frontiers or if you're Plus One or any other mega journal, you're looking at volume, volume, volume, volume. You're looking at volume, volume, volume, volume. You're looking at not necessarily particularly in-depth peer review. Frontiers that's their reputation, at least these days. Plus One is a general journal. It covers everything, all sciences, frontiers, of course, if you look at all the Frontiers journals, they cover absolutely everything. Frontiers, of course, if you look at all the Frontiers journals, they cover absolutely everything. But Frontiers in Veterinary Sciences is very, very broad based. They have very different editorial board structures, very different peer review practices and the volume it's tens of thousands. We're looking at, for instance, for JAVMA. The denominator of that impact factor formula that I gave you is two years of what we call citable items 366. If you look at frontiers or plus one, you're getting into the tens of thousands of articles. Basically, so it's a very different creature.
Speaker 3:I think JAVMA has always been driven by the desire to serve the members of the American Veterinary Medical Association.
Speaker 3:I think increasingly in the last three years since you've been there, lisa, it's been very much a curiosity about what would drive the members to like their journal, what brings value to the members, and I think that some of the survey work that we've done and some of the presentations that you've made at the colleges and your interactions with veterinarians have made it really clear that what they value is that voice that reaches the whole profession.
Speaker 3:Basically, ajvr has come very, very far just in the last year or so. I think it was what I would from my practice of journal consultancy. It looked like a dying journal and one of the things that I love to do is to try to help journals to be revived and to thrive. And if you're a scientific journal, as AJBR is and we know that our academic members are a relatively tiny proportion of the whole membership of AVMA so if you're an academically oriented journal, scientific journal, you need to reach out to a broader audience. You need to attract content from beyond, necessarily, the membership of the association, and we've done a lot of work in messaging. One of the biggest things for AJBR that has made it much more appealing to authors is that it is now an open access journal, which means that there are no barriers to getting to that research and it fits in with the model that most scientific practitioners these days are espousing, which is, you know, absolutely no barriers, commitment to making science available to everybody.
Speaker 2:Well, any successes that we've had in the journal. You've certainly been part of and we deeply appreciate your consultancy and advice.
Speaker 3:Thank you, my pleasure.
Speaker 2:One of the other things that we uniquely do, compared to all of those other journals that are highly submitted by veterinary scientists, are published case reports and, as you said, we do, a lot of our journal is because we are a journal to the members. We publish case reports not because they're highly cited or because they're going to be fantastic for practitioners, but they allow sometimes for credentialing, for different board certification, as well as allow students and residents to get their feet wet in publishing. So that doesn't help our impact factor either, but it's part of our mission, absolutely.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I am super proud of AJVR. One of the things that I've been working on is going through all of JAVMON AJVR content to look at different themes to create this virtual collection. Virtual collections have various different topics in them, and the one we're working on right now is Zoo, zoo Companion, wildlife and Aquatics, and it is a beast. Currently we have 60 pages of content from both journals, so they're going to be broken up into four different collections instead of one mega collection. But just going back through AJVR, I think I'm in like 2010 right now. I want to say, with the content, it really gets to be almost like bare bones as far as like the issues or concerns. Looking at those articles compared to the caliber and volume of the submissions we have now makes me really, really proud of where we've taken it to today. So it's cool to see that transformation going through the years.
Speaker 3:I think that's wonderful, sarah.
Speaker 3:One of the things that we did early this year, again with Clarivate so the owners of Web of Science we purchased email lists of authors in the veterinary sciences journals above us in Impact Factor selected journals. So we selected about 10 journals, went back about five years, went with corresponding authors, deduplicated the lists. In other words, only one email per author. So if they were submitting to multiple journals, they didn't get multiple emails and sent two campaigns. One was basically here we are, this is who we are, and it got a very good open rate, click-through rate, and then we'd sent our survey to those authors and got some very, very good results back that we can build on With our campaign for the survey. The incentive to answer the survey was a discount on the article processing charge and we actually got almost 100 people who said they would use that discount before December of 2025. So we'll track that and see if they come in. But that's the kind of activity that is so much fun to do because you see real-time, real-life results coming in from the work that we do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's great to have an evidence-based approach when making decisions for our journals. So, like we talked about, impact factor is a lagging indicator. So, while it's important, it's really not a good real-time indication of a journal's impact. Morna, can you share information about more contemporary methods of analyzing journal impact?
Speaker 3:Absolutely. I think there are a few things that are really good to track in real time. One is just looking at the number of downloads you're getting for articles. That's sort of an indicator that there's interest out there. That, of course, can be driven by what kind of social media and marketing activity you're doing around specific papers, and it can also be driven to some extent by the authors and their institutions and the kind of attention that they are getting for their papers.
Speaker 3:So we're very, very keen on authors using techniques like search engine optimization in order to have their paper come up quite high in the list of discovered papers when on a search in PubMed and Google Scholar and so on. The measurement of those, the metrics around those, are done by a company called Altmetric which is basically looking at many, many inputs that would indicate engagement of an audience. So things like how many times a paper has been tweeted about, how many times it's been picked up in a public policy document, how many times it's been in a news story, and they weight those different factors differently. So, thanks to Sarah, we've been doing a fantastic amount and terrific job in social media, which I think is really helping to move the journals forward in the public eye Watching the altmetric scores coming in and the ranking of the journals and dimensions rankings. Each month we see AJBR and JAVMA way up at the top of these rankings. You know better than I. We're currently sitting, sarah. I think it's three number three.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so for just context, there's thousands of different veterinary science journals and JAVMA has consistently been number three out of those thousands. And then AJVR has been sitting between 14 and 15, which is a huge improvement. I think when I started it was like maybe like 60 or something when we first looked at the data. So it's all about that consistent and just contemporary messaging too, and I had the opportunity to share those two to the whole scholarly publishing industry at two different society conventions recently, which has been really, really cool, and to see how we're measuring up against some other journals.
Speaker 3:Great yeah. So I think Altmetric is wonderful. I think we should be tracking the number of downloads by articles and, generally speaking, as we look ahead, I think we're going to try to develop, you know very much real-time, immediate marketing to push out important papers and you know an issue at a time or articles at a time or collection at a time to the lists that we have, both in-house and, occasionally, external lists.
Speaker 1:So, Morna, overall, what are your final thoughts on Javma and AJVR's impact?
Speaker 3:Paul, what are your final thoughts on Javma and AJVR's impact? Well, I think on the up and up for sure. I'm thrilled to be part of the team. I think it's wonderful to see actual real life, real time results for what we do behind the scenes and just getting the word out. It's a constant theme of what we do and the kind of you know, with the kind of thoughtful quality, innovative editorial direction that the journals are getting from Lisa and her team. I think that you know we're seeing a tremendous result coming. But you know we're seeing a tremendous result coming.
Speaker 3:Other staff members are responsible for the timely production of these papers, getting them on the web. One of the big things is that we have a much more navigable and usable website than we did before, and so that's particularly for AJVR, I think is critical, because I think in the academic world there's not so much emphasis on print, much more on online access. With JASMA, our surveys indicate that people still really like the print, and I think it's partly because you have such gorgeous cover art, so you can hardly resist picking up the issue and looking through it and, as um you know as a, as a physical entity, it's a wonderful reminder to veterinarians that this is their journal and um, you know that they're, that it's a resource for them to use in their practice well.
Speaker 2:thank you again, morna, for all that you do. I know you're an avid horse and dog lover and just a pet parent in general, so you know, I think what we are all so proud of is, in the end, what we're doing is improving animals' lives by helping veterinarians, and that's keeping that in mind and serving our members has just made it's a really fulfilling job, and we're really fortunate to have you along in this journey.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure talking with you. It's an absolute daily pleasure working with you and I'm looking forward to seeing you both soon. Thank you.
Speaker 2:One last question, Morna, before we go. Something kind of fun. Morna Conway, what is the oldest or the most interesting item on your desk or in your desk drawer?
Speaker 3:I think the most interesting item and I'll show it to you is this pen holder, that is, my Yorkshire Terrier, tuppence, aka Tuppy. This was her first Master Agility Championship in Birmingham, alabama, in 2012. She, by 2017, alabama in 2012. She, by 2017, had earned 11 Master Agility Champions and she was the number one Yorkshire Terrier in the country in 2015. Sadly, very, very sadly, she died of nasal cancer about three years ago, and so, again, my passion for working with ABMA and for this involvement with the journals is that I hope that, as a devoted pet parent, that we can help to spread the knowledge about new methods, new approaches to dealing with these terrible diseases that our darling canines suffer from increasingly.
Speaker 1:I just attended a leadership course recently and we were talking about what drives teams and organizations and I was sharing that. People on our team are pet parents and they care about animals and we're helping animals, helping veterinarians, every day. So I think it's a super cool motivation and way to just be inspired to continue to do your best and make these journals the best that they can be to further help the animals and their owners. Thank you, morna. We really appreciate you being here today and for consulting with us and being a part of our team. I'm Sarah Wright with Lisa Fortier. I want to thank each of you for joining us on this episode of the Veterinary Vertex Podcast. We love sharing cutting edge veterinary research with you and we want to hear from you. Be sure to leave us a rating and review on Apple podcasts or whatever platform you listen to.
