Since I was sacked from editing Medical Hypotheses in May 2010, the Impact Factor...
(citations to Medical Hypotheses in the target year for papers published in the preceding two years - so that the 2012 IF is citations in that year for papers published in 2010 and 2011 - which means that the 2012 IF is still not free of the effect of papers I accepted while still editor in the first four months of 2010)
...has declined from being above average for all medical journals (and therefore considerably above average for all journals) to, well, mediocrity:
I do not note this fact merely from schadenfreude but also because the journal which currently styles itself 'Medical Hypotheses' is a dishonest fake and a travesty of the vision bequeathed by the founder David Horrobin; and as such it ought to be closed-down - and on present trends it surely will be.
Which is nice.
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2 comments:
Luqman has left a new comment on your post "Bruce Charlton Sacked - Impact Factor trends and t...":
"Makes sense. Medical Hypotheses was unique in its approach, no matter what objections people had to some of its content. Since that is gone, it has ceased to be relevant. I don't doubt this would have happened even if you had not objected to the new direction of the journal and stayed on board Dr. Charlton.
"The medical profession can only suffer by kowtowing to "political correctness".
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"...the loss and decline of Medical Hypotheses was inevitable. I'm surprised it didn't happen earlier."
@L - I think the reason it did not happen earlier was that the journal made such a lot of money for the publishers, because until 2009 there were page charges in addition to the other sources of revenue (paper copy subscriptions, a share of e-journal bundle subscriptions, offprint sales).
In June 2009 the page charges were abolished, and thereby the journals autonomy was destroyed; the fledgling spin-off sister journal Bioscience Hypotheses was immediately terminated, and Medical Hypotheses only survived a couple of months before Elsevier began killing it.
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