The 2022 Impact Factor of 3.3: We are the best Polish cardiology journal

Abstract

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On June 28, 2023, Clarivate Analytics announced an update of the most well-known metric in scholarly publishing, the journal Impact Factor (IF) for more than 21 000 journals, as part of the Web of Science Journal Citation Reports®. This day is always a much-anticipated event for all academic publishers and editors since the two-year IF remains the most important metric of a journal’s standing in sciences. This year, for the first time, the journal IF is presented with one decimal place, instead of 3, which was the tradition since its first release in 1975.

The latest IF of Kardiologia Polska (Kardiol Pol, Polish Heart Journal) is 3.3. Our previous IF was slightly higher and amounted to 3.7. Reasons for this decrease are multiple starting from the fluctuations in citation counts of COVID-19 papers, a transient increase in the number of original articles up to 8 per issue in 2021, and finally, everyday challenges encountered after the change of our publisher. However, looking at the current list of top-ranking Polish scientific journals that have received their IFs (Table 1), Kardiol Pol has defended its position of the best cardio­logy journal. No-ly, several Polish medical journals have suffered 10%–20% decreases in their IFs in the latest Clarivate reports.

Table 1. List of Polish journals with the highest 2022 IF (based on the 2023 Journal Citation Reports issued by Clarivate Analytics)

Journal	2022 Impact Factor
Oeconomia Copernicana	8.5
Nonlinear Engineering — Modeling and Application	8.3
Cellular & Molecular Biology Letters	8.3
Biocybernetics and Biomedical Engineering	6.4
Equilibrium-Quarterly Journal of Economics and Economic Policy	5.7
Biology of Sport	5.6
Polish Archives of Internal Medicine — Polskie Archiwum Medycyny Wewnętrznej	4.8
Archives of Civil and Mechanical Engineering	4.4
Pharmacological Reports	4.4
Entrepreneurial Business and Economics Review	3.8
Archives of Medical Science	3.8
Pediatria i Medycyna Rodzinna — Paediatrics and Family Medicine	3.6
Reviews on Advanced Materials Science	3.6
Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching	3.4
Kardiologia Polska (Polish Heart Journal)	3.3

Undoubtedly COVID-19 articles contributed substantially to the total citation counts in our journal (Table 2), and less interest in this disease affected the 2022 IF.

Table 2. Eleven papers published in our journal in 2020 or 2021, which were most cited in 2022 and most contributed to the 2022 IF of 3.3

Title	Authors	Reference	2022 citation count
Association between cardiovascular disease, cardiovascular drug therapy, and in-hospital outcomes in patients with COVID-19: data from a large single-center registry in Poland	Terlecki M, Wojciechowska W, Klocek M, et al.	Kardiol Pol. 2021; 79 (7–8): 773–780	13
Dietary interventions in blood pressure lowering: current evidence in 2020	Strilchuk L, Cincione RI, Fogacci F, Cicero AFG	Kardiol Pol. 2020; 78 (7–8): 659–666	13
Every rose has its thorns — acute myocarditis following COVID-19 vaccination	Sokolska JM, Kurcz J, Kosmala W	Kardiol Pol. 2021; 79 (10): 1153–1154	12
Current challenges in the diagnosis and treatment of cardiac myxoma	Samanidis G, Khoury M, Balanika M, Perrea DN	Kardiol Pol. 2020; 78 (4): 269–277	9
The association of acute-to-chronic glycemic ratio with no-reflow in patients with ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction undergoing primary percutaneous coronary intervention	Şimşek B, Çınar T, Tanık VO, et al.	Kardiol Pol. 2021; 79 (2): 170–178	8
Telemedicine solutions in cardiology	Piotrowicz R, Krzesiński P, Balsam P, et al.	Kardiol Pol. 2021; 79 (2): 215–229	8
Acute myocarditis associated with the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine	Shumkova M, Vassilev D, Karamfiloff K, et al.	Kardiol Pol. 2021; 79 (11): 1282–1283	8
Effects of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic on the number of hospitalizations for myocardial infarction: regional differences. Population analysis of 7 million people	Gąsior M, Gierlotka M, Tycińska A, et al.	Kardiol Pol. 2020; 78 (10): 1039–1042	7
Identification of potential novel biomarkers and therapeutic targets involved in human atrial fibrillation based on bioinformatics analysis	Fan G, Wei J	Kardiol Pol. 2020; 78 (7–8): 694–702	7
Reaching the left bundle branch pacing area within 36 heartbeats	Jastrzębski M, Moskal P	Kardiol Pol. 2021; 79 (5): 587–588	7
Feasibility of the intravascular lithotripsy in coronary artery disease. Short-term outcomes of the Lower-Silesia Shockwave Registry	Rola P, Włodarczak A, Kulczycki JJ	Kardiol Pol. 2021; 79 (10): 1133–1135	7

On the other hand, the best general medicine journals (with the best example of The Lancet, which in 2023, with IF of 202, outperformed for the first time the long-standing leader, The New England Journal of Medicine, with IF of 158.5) experienced an important change due to COVID-19 papers. Interesting changes in the ranking can be also observed in the cardiology category. Now the top-ranked cardiology journal is Nature Reviews in Cardiology (2022 IF 49.6) followed by Circulation (IF 39.9) and European Heart Journal (IF 35.8).

The 2022 IF of 3.3 is good news since our predicted value was 3.2. The whole Society, editors, and publisher are extremely grateful to all our supporters who contributed to our present standing in 2022. The top citing investigators are as follows: Maciej Lesiak (56 citations), Mariusz Gąsior (38 citations), and Stanisław Bartuś (26 citations). We appreciate every researcher who referenced our materials in 2022. We are indebted to all authors who entrusted their work, which gained much interest in 2022, to us (Table 2).

We remain committed to high-quality publishing and strive to choose articles that present novel findings of potential interest for other researchers, supported by sound methodology, in particular appropriate statistical analysis. Now we are thinking of the 2023 IF, which should be higher, proportionally to our aspirations and potential. The 2023 IF will be generated based on the total number of our citations in 2023 (regardless of the type of articles cited and including self-citations) divided by the total number of so-called ci-le items (including articles and reviews) published in our journal in 2021 or 2022. Therefore, we strongly encourage all our supporters, authors, and reviewers to read and cite our material starting from editorials, through reviews, original articles, and clinical vignettes, while working on new articles. Every single citation matters and without continued support of our readers, our ambitions will not be achieved in the near future.

Our society has decided to switch the titles of our journal as of January 1, 2024. The English title — Polish Heart Journal — will be provided first while the Polish title — Kardiol Pol — will be in second place. According to Clarivate Analytics, such a switch will ensure the journal will maintain its IF and avoid the risk of having to build its standing from scratch. The existence of these 2 titles (Polish and English) is likely to be challenging for authors referencing our articles; therefore, a higher IF next year is desirable. Intensified efforts to achieve, in 2023, a higher IF than in 2022 are ongoing.

During the 2023 International Congress of the Polish Cardiac Society in Poznan, we hope for inspiring discussions on how to improve our journal. All comments will be welcome so we can achieve, next year, an IF of 4 or more.

Article information

Conflict of interest: None declared.

Funding: None.

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