Measuring publication impact, and publishing and funding models.

The impact factor, or, more correctly, the journal impact factor [JIF; Thompsons Reuters (ISI)] has featured in previous reports of the Cardiovascular Journal of Africa (CVJA). As expected, it has been steadily rising and is now at 1.022 (2015). This is not to be scoffed at. Of the 14 listed medical journals in Africa, it is third to the South African Medical Journal (SAMJ; JIF = 1.5). Similarly, in another major database, Scopus, it ranks at number 184 out of 333 journals of cardiovascular medicine globally. Within Africa it is the only cardiovascular journal indexed by Thompson Reuters and also by Scopus. These statistics are based on citations to articles that appear in journals, and formulae that relate the number of citations to published articles in a journal over a given time period, and are part of the more extensive ways of evaluating scientific output under the umbrella term bibliometrics.