Publishing in a heart failure journal—where lies the scientific interest?

When you create a new journal, like ESC Heart Failure, people give you a rather lot of time for development of style and performance. Nowadays, it regularly takes 4–6 years to get recognized in PubMed and then another 1–2 years to obtain an impact factor. That is, when all is going reasonably well. When you take over an established journal, like the European Journal of Heart Failure, people expect fast success or at least visible change. With regard to the look and feel of a journal, editorial style, and communication as well as editorial office performance, it is indeed possible for a new editor-in-chief to give a journal a new style fairly quickly. However, performance markers like the impact factor can only be impacted upon slowly. Marco Metra has been the editor-in-chief of the European Journal of Heart Failure since the end of 2014 with responsibility for all published articles since January 2015. Only slowly can we fully appreciate the impact he has on the flagship journal of the Heart Failure Association of the European Society of Cardiology. And only the 2017 impact factor, which will come out in the summer of 2018, will then fully reflect his work and that of his team. During the last summer, we learned about the 2016 impact factors. The European Journal of Heart Failure strongly recovered from a reduction in impact factor last year and now features an impact factor of 6.968, which is markedly higher than its 2015 impact factor of 5.135, or the 2014 and 2013 impact factors of 6.526 and 6.577, respectively. For external comparison, the 2016 impact factors of JACC-HF, Circulation Heart Failure, and Journal of Cardiac Failure are 8.493, 6.372, and 4.983, respectively. The 2016 impact factor of a journal of interest is based on the 2016 citations anywhere in the International Scientific Indexing recognized journals of papers published in 2014 and 2015 in that journal of interest divided by the number of full papers and reviews published in that journal that year. Journals can, to a small degree, modify the number of papers published. However, fewer papers published means in the future also fewer papers to cite, so the impact of publishing fewer papers is at best short term. Whether we like this or not, the impact factor is key for the external reputation of a journal, and the number of citations to its articles is also key. In order to fully understand what kind of research is cited, reading rakings of best-cited articles can be helpful. In Tables 1, 2, and 3, we list the 30 best-cited articles of the European Journal of Heart Failure related to their respective year of publication; that is, 2014, 2015, and 2016. Of course, there is a time lag between publication and citation, and hence, it is not surprising that, on average, the articles of 2014 are somewhat more cited than those from 2015 or 2016. The 30th best-cited article from 2014 was cited 24 times (Table 1), that of 2015 was cited 20 times (Table 2), and that of 2016 was cited only 11 times (Table 3). Nevertheless, this is not the whole truth. Certain very topical reviews and, in particular, guidelines get cited way out of proportion. The best-cited and second-best-cited articles from 2014 have so far been cited 69 and 52 times, respectively (Table 1), and those of 2015 have so far been cited 85 and 45 times, respectively (Table 2). In contrast, the best-cited and second-best-cited articles published in the European Journal of Heart Failure in 2016 were cited 318 and 81 times, respectively (Table 3). Not surprisingly, these articles are the 2016 ESC Guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of acute and chronic heart failure and the position statement from the task force on Takotsubo syndrome of the Heart Failure Association. Such articles provide guidance to a broad clinical community but often also form the basis of statements associated with many citations in the medical literature worldwide. To strengthen this point further, in Table 4, we list the 50 best-cited papers published in the European Journal of Heart Failure. The number of citations varies between 1131 (rank 1, 2008 ESC Heart Failure guideline), 719 (rank 2, 2012 ESC Heart Failure guideline), and 505 for the classical heart failure is more ‘malignant’ than cancer paper of Simon Stewart and colleagues (rank 3) to a paper on serum levels of microRNA in heart failure patients published by Goren et al. and cited 127 ED ITOR IAL