SCIENTIFIC COMMUNICATIONS: History, electronic journals and impact factors

This paper gives a short history of the development of scientific journals. During the last century there has been an increase of 7% a year in the number of scientific journals published, i.e. a doubling of the total number of new journals every 10-15 years. The only way to survive this information flood is to increase the quality of our scientific publications. There is also increasing internationalization among the so-called national scientific journals. The Internet has grown exponentially and now plays a role in the exchange of scientific information. There are many advantages to this, for example, rapid publishing, the cataloguing of articles according to subject, easy access to articles wherever computers are available. There are, however, still many problems to solve, amongst them the archiving of electronic journals and the protection of the integrity of information. The ranking system of measuring the quality of scientific journals using impact factors is of great value, but its importance has been over-exaggerated.