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Semin Liver Dis 2012; 32(04): 267-270
DOI: 10.1055/s-0032-1329907
Editorial
Thieme Medical Publishers 333 Seventh Avenue, New York, NY 10001, USA.

New Benchmarks for Seminars in Liver Disease

Paul D. Berk
1   Columbia University Medical Center, William Black Medical Research Building, New York, New York
› Author Affiliations
Further Information

Publication History

Publication Date:
08 February 2013 (online)

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With the publication of its November 2010 issue, Seminars in Liver Disease completed 30 years of publication. Its first issue, in February 1981, appeared in precisely the same month as the first issue of Hepatology. Having been there at the beginning, I can attest that the launching of these journals was accompanied by considerable angst on the part of those involved in both projects. We are now 32 years into the process and both have surpassed their founders' wildest dreams. They have thrived in parallel with the astonishing progress in both the scientific underpinnings and the clinical practice of hepatology, as further reflected in the progressive growth of the strikingly vibrant annual meetings of related professional societies such as AASLD and EASL.

As indicated on the cover of this (its November 2012) issue, in the past 2 years Seminars in Liver Disease has seen an appreciable increase in its ISI Impact Factor (IF) to a new high of 7.053 ([Fig. 1]). Although admittedly imperfect, the IF is widely considered a measure of the esteem in which journals are held both by their regular readers and by their respective fields. The Editors and Editorial Board of Seminars, as well as our publisher, Thieme, are highly appreciative of this vote of confidence in the value of our efforts. But what does it really mean?

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Fig. 1 The ISI Impact Factor for Seminars in Liver Disease. The increase in 2011 was to the highest level in the history of the journal.

It may be instructive to review how the IF is determined. By definition, the 2011 IF is the total number of citations during 2011 of articles published in Seminars during the 2 preceding years, 2009 and 2010. Seminars published 75 articles during those 2 years, which were cited a total of 529 times in 2011, for an IF of 529/75 = 7.053. Sixty-eight of the 75 published articles (90.1%) were cited at least once. All seven articles that were not cited at all were either Forewords to an issue (n = 2) or CPC-type articles in the Diagnostic Problems in Hepatology series (n = 5). Though infrequently cited, a survey of our readership some years ago indicated that the latter were, nonetheless, widely read and very popular. The most frequently cited 15 articles, representing 20% of the total, are drawn from every issue published in 2009–2010.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15]

Citations, as reflected in the IF, are only one measure of the interest generated by an article and its ultimate impact on the field, and the IF, as currently calculated, may not be the best indicator of the real impact of a journal. The ability of readers to download published articles from the Internet has grown dramatically, and the number of downloads of specific articles typically far exceeds the number of times they are cited in subsequent publications. By now Thieme supports a complete online archive of all articles ever published in Seminars in Liver Disease, going back to the very earliest, published in 1981. Between 2004 and late September 2012, the 100 articles most frequently downloaded from this archive[15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] [38] [39] [40] [41] [42] [43] [44] [45] [46] [47] [48] [49] [50] [51] [52] [53] [54] [55] [56] [57] [58] [59] [60] [61] [62] [63] [64] [65] [66] [67] [68] [69] [70] [71] [72] [73] [74] [75] [76] [77] [78] [79] [80] [81] [82] [83] [84] [85] [86] [87] [88] [89] [90] [91] [92] [93] [94] [95] [96] [97] [98] [99] [100] [101] [102] [103] [104] [105] [106] [107] [108] [109] [110] [111] [112] [113] [114] were downloaded 265,307 times! Individual articles in this top 100 were downloaded 1,549 to 7,295 times!

Seminars authors are almost exclusively engaged in various academic aspects of hepatic medicine. Their peers are also largely academicians, who are also writing articles, for Seminars and other publications, on the same and related topics. For these individuals, a high IF suggests that their work is known to and acknowledged by their peers. It is therefore a matter of some personal gratification. Our overall readership is a larger and more diverse group than our authors. Although we have not formally surveyed their professional roles and interests in the past decade, our impression is that—in addition to our authors—they are principally a sophisticated group of clinically engaged physicians who turn to Seminars for up-to-date reviews of clinically important problems, and for clinically relevant basic science background. Some form of assessment of article downloads might be a better reflection of their interests than the IF. We are looking at ways of formalizing this approach. Meanwhile, the Editorial Board continually seeks ways to make Seminars of more value and of greater interest to our readers.

Since its inception 32 years ago, we have followed the same format. Seminars is a quarterly journal of review articles, each issue of which consists of 8–10 review articles devoted to various aspects of a central, overarching theme. At the annual editorial Board meeting, held every November during the AASLD meeting, potential topics for future issues starting 14 months in the future are identified, along with the names of candidate Guest Editors. The choice of issue topics is a crucial part of the meeting agenda. Topics are chosen on the basis of clinical and scientific importance, the availability of new information that the Editorial Board considers important to bring to our readership, and a sense that an important part of Seminars' mission is to present a review of all of the most important aspects of hepatology over the course of a 3- or 4-year cycle. This latter concern is critically important because it is clear that we could increase our IF substantially simply by increasing the frequency with which we published issues dealing with perennially popular topics such as hepatitis C. However, for a quarterly journal this can only be done by decreasing the frequency of publication of issues on other topics that ultimately may be equally important but are less popular at the moment.

After the topics for a year are selected, a Guest Editor for each issue is appointed. The Guest Editor then proposes a Table of Contents of 8 to 10 review articles and nominates the authors for his issue. Once these are approved by the Editor, authors are enlisted and creation of the issue proceeds. Throughout our 32 years of publication, Seminars has never published unsolicited articles.

The results suggest that this approach has served Seminars well. However, over the past few years, two phenomena have challenged our comfort with it. First, the increasing velocity with which important new findings are reported in the primary literature does not always mesh well with a system in which we may not return to a topic to report on these findings for 3 to 4 years. Second, along with our increasing IF, we have been receiving increasing numbers of unsolicited submissions. Most are typical research articles, either clinical or basic: While of varying quality, even the best do not mesh with our review-article-based model. Some, however, are in fact reviews, or articles proposing such things as new disease classifications or treatment algorithms that seem to the Editors to be of more than routine significance. We have concluded that a process that allows fairly prompt publication of such articles, whether or not they relate to the central theme of an issue, would be of benefit to our readers and would enhance the value of Seminars. The first published example of such a paper, entitled “Heterogeneity of Patients with Intermediate (BCLC B) Hepatocellular Carcinoma: Proposal for a Subclassification to Facilitate Treatment Decisions” by Professor Luigi Bolondi and a group of distinguished colleagues, appears on pages 348–359 of this issue[115] under the heading, Editors' Choice. We anticipate that such Editors' Choices will become a regular, if intermittent, feature of Seminars going forward. While opening Seminars to the new type of article, I want to emphasize that we are not opening the floodgates to acceptance of large numbers of unsolicited articles. Most such papers will continue to be declined. However, authors of reviews such as this one or those described above, who consider their papers to be of particular significance and therefore to merit special consideration by the Editors of Seminars, are invited to make their case in a letter accompanying their manuscript. Such manuscripts should be submitted to me as follows:

Paul D. Berk, MD

Editor, Seminars in Liver Disease

Columbia University Medical Center

William Black Medical Research Building

650 West 168th Street-Room 1006, Box 57A

New York, NY 10025, USA

or via e-mail: pb2158@columbia.edu

We anticipate that the publication of such articles might generate some comment and controversy, which I invite readers to submit to me at the same address for possible publication in a new, and hopefully lively, Correspondence section. Specific instructions for the preparation and submission of potential Editors' Choice articles are under development and will ultimately appear on the Seminars website.