Abstract
The Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery was founded in 1999. As a veterinary journal this makes it something of a ‘baby’, but a baby that we are very proud of! There are many different ways to try and assess the value and importance of a journal – our aim has always been to make this journal an indispensable tool for those engaged in clinical feline practice, and we have plans to further enhance its role in the future.
One objective way in which many journals are assessed is through their ‘Impact Factor’ (IF). A journal's IF is calculated by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) on an annual basis in its Journal Citation Report. This provides a quantitative measure of the relative importance of a journal through looking at the number of times papers that appear in the journal are cited elsewhere. As JFMS is a relatively young journal, the first time we had an ISI IF was in the Citation Report of 2004 (published last year) – at that time we entered the scene with an extremely creditable IF of 0.867. We were delighted to have achieved this with our first listing, but the Citation Report for 2005 has recently been released, and in this our IF has increased dramatically to 1.137. We are absolutely thrilled with this achievement. The current IF for JFMS now ranks the journal at number 32 of all the listed veterinary journals, and it ranks in the top 3 journals of its type (clinically small animal orientated journals).
As editors of JFMS we are delighted that the journal has been so well received and that the manuscripts that are published have clearly been recognised for their quality and importance. However, that the journal has grown and been so successful is not through the work of either of us as editors. Rather, the success of the journal is down to two groups of people:
Firstly, we owe a huge debt of gratitude to the many authors who have submitted such outstanding papers to JFMS. Especially in the early days, when the journal was unproven and a new idea, we were fortunate enough to have the support of many eminent veterinarians who saw and shared our vision for the journal, and who were prepared to submit their papers to us. This undoubtedly encouraged others to take the journal seriously, and we are hugely grateful to all our authors for their support of the journal – without them we would simply not be here.
Secondly, there is the often overlooked process of peer-review. As with other main-stream journals, JFMS relies on the process of peer-review to ‘quality control’ and (hopefully) improve the standard of papers that we publish. Every manuscript is read and critiqued by at least two independent reviewers, and much of the burden of peer-review falls on the members of our editorial board. This is time-consuming and unpaid work, and represents a substantial contribution by those individuals involved to the journal and to their veterinary colleagues who have submitted manuscripts. Again, we would like to express our sincere and heartfelt thanks to all our editorial board members (past and present) and to those many other individuals who have also been prepared to review manuscripts for us from time to time.
We are absolutely elated at how quickly JFMS has grown and become established as a main-stream veterinary journal, and you can be assured too that we will not be resting on our laurels, but rather looking at ways we can further improve the journal and improving the needs of our readers and members. You can expect exciting new developments in the near future! Please send us your suggestions and ideas, too. For now though, with what has been achieved, it is time to acknowledge everyone who has been involved in helping make the journal the success it is, and especially again to our authors and our reviewers – a big thank you!