How do I look?

The question of how one should judge a journal is a difficult one. Some measures have been proposed. The best known of these may be the impact factor. This is a measure of how frequently articles from a journal are quoted by other workers. The assumption is that the larger the number of times articles are cited, the more valuable the published work is and by extension, the better the journal in which this work is published. Acceptance rates (or its converse, rejection rates) are also used to assess the value of a journal. A journal that accepts only a small proportion of submitted articles is assumed to be a good journal that has high standards. The number of subscribers to a journal may indicate its worth with a larger number of people being willing to pay to read a better journal. The number of advertisers a journal attracts is another measure of its worth though this is more commonly used in assessing or comparing general interest periodicals rather than medical journals. The production qualities of a journal including paper, printing, color images, and language editing also influence the way it is perceived. There are some quite obvious shortcomings of each of these measures. Less obviously, there are ways of manipulating them so that a journal appears better than it is. But taken together, they do give us a rough idea of the quality of a journal. We think our journal does reasonably well on all these measures, a legacy of the hard work of editorial teams that have managed the journal in the past. We hope we can continue to maintain standards and will strive to improve them.