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Editorial

Staying Afloat in the Sea ofInformation

Adam ClarkIan Potter Library, Alfred Hospital, Commercial Road, Melbourne, Vic., Australia

Publishing and promoting a scientific journal in today’senvironment of vast information resources must be

a daunting task. The old adage of Publish or Perish, whenapplied to scientific journal publishing, could perhaps beparaphrased as Be Indexed or Be Ignored, or even Be Indexedor Be Invisible! So it’s an important milestone for Heart Lungand Circulation (HLC) to be accepted for indexing in theMedline database.1

funding grants. Journal prestige is usually measured bycomparative impact factors provided by the annual ISIJournal Citation Reports (JCR). These ISI impact factorsare calculated from bibliometric analysis of citation pat-terns derived from ISI’s Science Citation Index. HLC iscurrently not indexed in the Science Citation Index, andhence does not have a ISI impact factor. Inclusion in thisindex would seem to be the next logical step. Not hav-ing an impact factor or having a very low one can lead

Medline and Beyond

Medline, through its free portal PubMed, and othercommercial versions, remains the most important litera-ture searching database in medicine and the biomedicalsciences. Inclusion in Medline will have an immediateeffect of “internationalising” HLC’s presence in themedical literature. It should however be noted thatHLC is also indexed or included in a number of otherimportant bibliographic databases, including EMBASEand Scopus. EMBASE provides complementary contentto Medline, with a stronger European focus. A combinedMedline/EMBASE search is typically the starting pointfor systematic reviews published in the Cochrane Library.Scopus is a new abstract and citation database covering15,000 academic journal titles across a wider scientific

to a “catch-22” situation, whereby the ranking (or lack ofone) will work against a journal trying to raise its profile.This is one of a number of criticisms levelled against theexclusive use of impact factors to rate journal quality. Cita-tion analysis and impact ranking for HLC will be producedover time by the newly developed Scopus Citation Tracker,this is competitor to ISI Science Citation Index. Some cita-tion data for individual HLC articles can also currently befound using Google Scholar.

Medical Libraries

Over the last five years, a major trend in library journalpurchases has been the replacement of individual jour-nal subscriptions by purchasing online journal “bundles”from publishers or commercial journal aggregators. The

scope than Medline or EMBASE. Links to HLC articles effect of this trend is that institutions gain online access tolnHjrlshfov

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can also be found on the free Internet scientific searchengines Scirus and Google Scholar, and via full-textdatabases such as ScienceDirect, Blackwell Synergy andJournals@Ovid. The end result of this improved visibilitywill be increased international demand and usage byclinicians, researchers and students of the quality articlespublished by the journal.

Impact Factors

Academics’ choice of which journals to submit papers to,ironically show that the potential usage rate of their arti-cles is not their most important consideration. Studieshave shown that the main academic priority is to havearticles published in prestigious journals, which will pro-vide the greatest career benefit and assistance in gaining

E-mail address: K.Hansen@alfred.org.au.

© 2006 Australasian Society of Cardiac and Thoracic SurgeAustralia and New Zealand. Published by Elsevier Inc. Al

arger numbers of journals, including titles they may haveever heard of before. It is possible that in the long-termLC will benefit greatly from this new model of library

ournal purchasing. HLC is part of Elsevier’s ScienceDi-ect platform, which has high penetration into universityibraries worldwide. Therefore clinicians, researchers andtudents with university affiliation will now commonlyave online access to HLC through the ScienceDirect plat-

orm. Smaller health libraries are also able to obtain print-uts of articles via inter-library loan request from a uni-ersity library under the ScienceDirect license.

eference

1. Rosenfeldt F. Indexation at last: the end of the beginning. HeartLung Circ 2006;15:1–2.

and the Cardiac Society ofts reserved.

1443-9506/04/$30.00doi:10.1016/j.hlc.2006.05.010