Interactive Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery 3:1-2(2004)
© 2004 European Association of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery
www.icvts.org: The most frequent downloads Improved feedback from an interactive publication
Ludwig K. von Segesser*
Department of Cardiovascular Surgery, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois, CHUV, Rue du Bugnon 46, CH-1011 Lausanne, Switzerland
* Tel.: +41-21-314-2280; fax: +41-21-314-2278
ludwig.von-segesser{at}chuv.hospvd.ch
http://www.cardiovasc.net
Received January 23, 2004;
received in revised form January 23, 2004;
accepted January 23, 2004
There are various ways to track the success and performance of traditional paper-based scientific journals. One of the tools best known, is certainly the Impact Factor, which is assessed by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI). The Impact Factor is designed to measure the way a journal receives citations to its articles over time, and it is calculated by dividing the number of current citations a journal receives to articles published in the two previous years, divided by the number of articles published in those same years [1]. Interestingly enough, the Impact Factor does not measure the quality of a publication, but rather the number of times it was cited—for good or for bad.
Although we assume, that an author who cites a paper has also read it, this cannot be taken for guaranteed in all cases. As a matter of fact, the Impact Factor is mainly a tool to assess the popularity of a paper within the scientific (publishing) community. However, in medicine, readership is not limited to the scientific, i.e. publishing community, and there is probably one order of magnitude more readers than writers. It is more difficult to track the number of readers as compared to the number of writers. In the past, this issue was mainly addressed with questionnaires including a question such as: ‘How many persons read this publication?’.
Of course, the estimated number of readers obtained through such a study, is not exactly based on a hard end-point, as we like to have it for scientific assessment. Hence, the possibility to assess the number of downloads from our web-site at www.icvts.org hosting Interactive Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery is more than welcome, as it brings not only quantitative information over time with regard to the interest raised by Interactive Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery, but also improved feedback about the type of publications preferred by the community interested in the topics published.
The most frequent downloads from www.icvts.org in 2003 are listed in Table 1, and ranked by number of downloads within the following categories: - *** most frequent downloads
- ** very frequent downloads
- * frequent downloads
The unique concept of Interactive Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery, which includes pre-publication on the web with a discussion period, and joint printing of hardcopies keeping together the publications with the comments received, requires, that the information presented in Table 1 is appreciated on top of what is expected for a traditional journal appearing only in print. More insight is available now at www.icvts.org!
doi:10.1016/j.icvts.2004.01.010
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References
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- Amin M, Mabe M. Impact factors: use and abuse. Perspectives in Publishing. 2000;1:1–6
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