The 2009 race for impact by journals in sport and exercise science and medicine, and Tom Reilly's H index.

The 2009 race for impact by journals in sport and exercise science and medicine, and Tom Reilly's H index.

Abstract:	Amongst journals specializing in sport and exercise, the gold medal for the highest impact factor this year went for the first time to American Journal of Sports Medicine (3.6). Making a substantial improvement since last year, Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise was second equal with Exercise and Immunology Reviews (3.4). A substantial decline in form resulted in fourth place for Sports Medicine (3.0). Sharing the prize for most noteworthy improvement (70-80%) were Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport (1.9) and Journal of Sport Management (1.1). Other journals making substantial gains (30-70%) were Journal of Electromyography and Kinesiology (1.8), Human Movement Science (1.7), Journal of Aging and Physical Activity (1.7), Psychology of Sport and Exercise (1.6), and Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport (1.2). This year's new competitors were European Journal of Sport Science (0.8) and Sports Biomechanics (0.5). International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance failed to qualify but had an estimated factor of ~1.0. Journals showing substantial impairments in performance (10-40%) included Exercise and Sport Sciences Reviews (2.6), British Journal of Sports Medicine (2.1), Clinics in Sports Medicine (1.3), Journal of Applied Sport Psychology (1.1), and Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research (0.8). Journals with small or negligible change since last year included Journal of Biomechanics (2.8), Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports (2.3), Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology (2.1), Journal of Athletic Training (1.7), Journal of Sports Sciences (1.7), Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine (1.6), International Journal of Sports Medicine (1.6), International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism (1.4), Journal of Applied Biomechanics (1.2) and Pediatric Exercise Science (1.0). A new citation statistic, the H or Hirsch index, is gaining attention as a measure of lifetime impact of an individual researcher. The renowned and recently deceased Tom Reilly has an H index of 38, which means he is an author of 38 publications that have each been cited at least 38 times, or 1.06 for each of his 36 publishing years-a high benchmark for sport scientists. KEYWORDS: academic, citation, publication, research.

Article Type:	Table
Subject:	Science journals (Evaluation)
Author:	Hopkins, Will G.
Pub Date:	01/01/2009
Publication:	Name: Sportscience Publisher: Internet Society for Sport Science Audience: Academic Format: Magazine/Journal Subject: Health Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 Internet Society for Sport Science ISSN: 1174-9210
Issue:	Date: Annual, 2009 Source Volume: 13
Product:	Product Code: 2721320 Scientific & Technical Journals NAICS Code: 51112 Periodical Publishers
Geographic:	Geographic Scope: New Zealand Geographic Code: 8NEWZ New Zealand
Accession Number:	297310272
Full Text:	Updates July 2009: Hirsch (2005) demonstrated that his index is approximately proportional to a researcher's number of productive years. Researchers in the same discipline can therefore compare their H indices by dividing them by their years of publishing. Tom Reilly authored his first paper in 1973, giving him an H "rate" of 38/36 = 1.06 per publishing year. Several minor errors in the section on the H index have also been corrected. This article represents my annual update of the impact factors of journals in the disciplines of exercise and sport science and medicine, cribbed from the latest edition of Journal Citation Reports. If you are new to the notion of a journal's impact factor, it is the average number of times the average article in the journal has been cited recently. As such, it is an objective measure of the credibility or usefulness of articles in the journal. The impact factor probably adds little to what experienced researchers already know about the relative importance of journals. Nevertheless, these updates are justifiable if only for their entertainment value, which is not dissimilar to that of competitive sport. See last year's update and the links there-from for more information about the impact factor, its limitations, and related statistics. The abstract of this article provides an overview of this year's impact factors of the main journals in our disciplines, along with some new entrants. I was disappointed not to find the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance amongst them. This journal is now in its fourth year of publication and could have qualified for inclusion. I have therefore calculated its impact factor by putting its name and the years 2006-2007 into the advanced search form of Google Scholar. I retrieved 88 articles, and the total cites to these articles was 166. If we assume half the cites were made in journals published last year, the impact factor is approximately 1.0, which is a very good entry level. The value next year is likely to be lower, because 70 of the cites were to the article on magnitude-based inferences by Alan Batterham and me in the first issue, which will not be included in next year's calculation. As in previous updates I will finish this article by introducing you to another citation statistic. Earlier this year a colleague brought my attention to the H index or number, named after the physicist Jorge Hirsch, who suggested it as a measure of an individual's lifetime publishing impact. Rather than attempting to define the H index, I will explain how I got it for a particular individual. I chose Tom Reilly, a founding father not only of British and European sport science but also of chronobiology and ergonomics, who died on June 11. I started by putting t-reilly into the author field of the Google Scholar advanced search form. The resulting reference list comes up pre-sorted in approximate descending order of the number of cites to each reference. I counted down this list from the top until I reached the last reference where the number of cites exceeded or equaled the number of the reference. The number of that reference is Tom Reilly's H index, 38, which means that he had 38 publications each cited at least 38 times. We can now regard this number as a benchmark for outstanding lifetime impact by a sport scientist. Reilly and Thomas (1976) was his publication with the most cites (186). His total number of publications is difficult to determine precisely because of the other T Reillys, but it appears to be ~500. The procedure to get the H index was actu ally a little more difficult than I described above. To cut down on other T Reillys, I limited the search to references with at least one of the words exercise, sport, physical activity, ergonomic, and circadian. The list was still heavily contaminated with other T Reillys, most of which I eliminated by inserting tm-reilly wt-reilly dt-reilly tj-reilly te-reilly jt-reilly in the search field labeled without the words. The sorting was also far from perfect, so I copied the first 50 references into a Word doc to manually complete the editing and sorting, and I also skimmed the next 100 references for any highly cited publications that were out of sequence. There are several conceptual problems with the H index: it discriminates against individuals who have been influential by publishing only a few very highly cited articles; its value will be lower when estimated with a conservative database such as Web of Science; and by being essentially non-parametric it does not adequately take an individual's total productivity (publications) or total influence (cites) into account. On the other hand, the H index is easy to calculate and verify, if your name isn't too ordinary or you aren't too productive. With these limitations, the H index is good for some fun of the mine's-bigger-than-yours variety, but there will be a need for serious validation and benchmarking if it is used to award grants and promotions. Find out more about the index in a Wikipedia article and in Hirsch (2005). Hirsch JE (2005). An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 102, 16569-16572 Reilly T, Thomas V (1976). A motion analysis of work-rate in different positional roles in professional football match-play. Journal of Human Movement Studies 2, 87-97 Table 1: Impact factors (citations per paper) for sport and exercise science journals based on papers published in 2006 and 2007 that were cited in 2008. Some impact factors are shown as inequalities, to comply with terms of use set by Thomson Scientific. "<1.0" implies a value between 0.1 and 1.0. ??? indicates a likely accidental omission. A journal without an impact factor is not in Thomson Scientific's science or social sciences databases, either because the journal is too new or the factor is too low. Colors indicate changes in impact factor since last year. [up arrow] greater than or equal to]70% [up arrow] 30-69% [up arrow] 10-29% [up arrow] [down arrow]0-9% [down arrow] 10-60% Thomson Scientific, Inc. is the publisher and copyright owner of the Journal Citation Reports[R]. Impact Factors listed in this article are used with the express permission of Thomson Scientific. Published June 2009 [c]2009 Will G Hopkins Sport and Recreation, AUT University, Auckland 0627, New Zealand. Email. Reviewer: Greg Atkinson, Research Institute for Sport and Exercise Sciences, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool L3 2ET, UK. Table 1: Impact factors (citations per paper) for sport and exercise science journals based on papers published in 2006 and 2007 that were cited in 2008. Some impact factors are shown as inequalities, to comply with terms of use set by Thomson Scientific. "<1.0" implies a value between 0.1 and 1.0. ??? indicates a likely accidental omission. A journal without an impact factor is not in Thomson Scientific's science or social sciences databases, either because the journal is too new or the factor is too low. Colors indicate changes in impact factor since last year. <1.0 * ACSM's Health and Fitness Journal ??? Acta Physiologica Scandinavica <1.0 ** Adapted Physical Activity Quarterly American Journal of Medicine and Sports 1.7 American Journal of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation 3.9 American Journal of Physiology - Endo & Metab 3.6 American Journal of Physiology - Heart & Circ 3.6 American Journal of Sports Medicine 1.3 Applied Ergonomics 1.6 Applied Physiology Nutrition & Metabolism <1.0 * Applied Psychological Measurement 1.2 Applied Psychology-International Review 2.2 * Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation <1.0 *** Athletic Therapy Today 1.9 Australian Journal of Physiotherapy 0.8 ** Aviation Space and Environmental Medicine 1.7 * Behavior Research Methods <1.0 ** Biology of Sport 2.1 * British Journal of Sports Medicine 2.0 * Clinical Biomechanics 1.6 ** Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine 3.2 * Clinical Nutrition 1.3 *** Clinics in Sports Medicine Current Sports Medicine Reports <1.0 Deutsche Zeitschrift fur Sportmedizin Electromyography and Motor Control 1.6 Ergonomics 1.9 European Journal of Applied Physiology 2.7 * European Journal of Clinical Nutrition 0.8 * European Journal of Sport Science European Review of Aging and Physical Activity European Sports History Review 3.4 * Exercise and Immunology Reviews 2.6 *** Exercise and Sport Sciences Reviews 2.7 * Gait and Posture 1.7 ** High Altitude Medicine and Biology 1.7 Human Movement Science 5.8 * International Journal of Epidemiology International Journal of History of Sport International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport 1.4 International J of Sport Nutrition & Exercise Metabolism 0.6 * International Journal of Sport Psychology 1.6 ** International Journal of Sports Medicine International J of Sports Physiology & Performance International Review for the Sociology of Sport <1.0 * International Sportmed Journal International Sports Journal 0.2 Isokinetics and Exercise Science <0.1 Japanese Journal of Physical Fitness and Sport 1.7 Journal of Aging and Physical Activity Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 1.2 ** Journal of Applied Biomechanics 3.7 Journal of Applied Physiology 3.8 * Journal of Applied Psychology 1.1 *** Journal of Applied Sport Psychology 1.7 * Journal of Athletic Training 2.8 ** Journal of Biomechanics Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies 1.5 * Journal of Clinical Psychology Journal of Comparative Physical Education & Sport 1.8 Journal of Electromyography and Kinesiology 3.2 Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health Journal of Exercise Physiology Online ??? Journal of Human Movement Studies Journal of Human Performance in Extreme Environments <1.0 * Journal of Leisure Research 1.0 * Journal of Motor Behaviour 3.6 Journal of Nutrition 2.1 Journal of Occupational & Environmental Medicine 1.9 * Journal of Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy <1.0 ** Journal of the Philosophy of Sport Journal of Physical Education, Recreation, & Dance 4.6 ** Journal of Physiology 1.9 * Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport 1.3 Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 2.1 * Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology <1.0 ***** Journal of Sport and Social Issues Journal of Sport Behavior Journal of Sport History 1.1 * Journal of Sport Management <1.0 *** Journal of Sport Rehabilitation Journal of Sports Chiropractic and Rehabilitation <1.0 Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness 0.6 * Journal of Sports Science and Medicine 1.7 * Journal of Sports Sciences Journal of Sports Traumatology 0.8 * Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research Journal of Swimming Research <1.0 Journal of Teaching in Physical Education <1.0 Leisure Sciences Leisure Studies <1.0 Measurement in Physical Education & Exercise Science Medicina dello Sport 3.4 * Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise Medicine and Sport Science 1.6 * Motor Control 1.0 * Pediatric Exercise Science Pediatric Physical Therapy <1.0 ** Perceptual and Motor Skills Physical Educator 2.2 Physical Therapy 0.6 Physical Therapy in Sport ??? Physician and Sportsmedicine 1.6 Psychology of Sport and Exercise <1.0 * Quest Research in Sports Medicine 1.2 Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport 2.3 ** Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports <1.0 Science and Sports 0.7 Sociology of Sport Journal Sport History Review 0.5 Sport, Education, and Society 0.9 * (The) Sport Psychologist 0.5 * Sports Biomechanics Sports Exercise and Injury 3.0 ***** Sports Medicine 1.0 * Sports Medicine and Arthroscopy Review Sports Medicine Standards & Malpractice Reporter <1.0 Sportverletzung-Sportschaden Strength and Conditioning <1.0 *** Strength and Conditioning Journal Women in Sport & Physical Activity Journal [LEGENDS] * [up arrow] [greater than or equal to]70% \| [up arrow] 30-69% \| * [up arrow] 10-29% \| ** [up arrow] [down arrow] 0-9% \| *** [down arrow] 10-60%
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