Since its birth on 1 April 2001, several attempts have been made to achieve international recognition for the Netherlands Heart Journal. Over the past years, five major steps were taken. In the year 2005, the NHJ was accepted in EMBASE, in 2006 the NHJ became listed in PubMed Central, in 2007 the NHJ became cited in PubMed, and in 2008 indexed in the Web of Science (WOS). The NHJ articles published in 2007 and 2008 can be found in the various library digital archives (172 articles in PubMed, December 2008). Recently, all our articles dating back to 1 April 2001 became available in PubMed Central: httpwww.pubmedcentral.nih.govtocrender.fcgi?actionarchivejournal384. The PubMed Central database includes a total of 934 NHJ articles published since the foundation of our journal in 2001. These five steps can be seen as major advances for the international acknowledgement of the NHJ. They lend esteem and prestige to a journal that started as a national Dutch journal in 1987 (Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Cardiologie). A next major step will be the listing of all 934 publications in PubMed and the WOS. This will do justice to the authors who have contributed to the success of the NHJ. Hopefully, this will become effective in the beginning of 2009.
A more crucial step is the attainment of an acceptable impact factor. Impact factors of journals are calculated each year by Thomson Scientific (ISI) and reported in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). The calculation of impact factors is based on a two-year period. The impact factor in a specific year consists of the average number of citations of publications in the previous two years divided by the number of publications (citable items) in these two years. For instance, the impact factor of 2009 is the number of citations in 2009 to NHJ articles published in 2007 and 2008, divided by the number of NHJ articles published in 2007 and 2008. Usually, not all articles are included, but only the citable items such as original papers and review articles. Regarding the NHJ, it is difficult to establish an exact impact factor for the year 2009 as 2008 is not finished yet (as of the moment of this writing). Currently (1 December 2008), 214 NHJ articles have been indexed by the WOS (118 in 2007, 96 in 2008), 114 of which were through citable items (102 originals, 12 review articles). On 15 December 2008, there were 156 articles citing the NHJ according to the Web of Science. The NHJ is being cited by journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, Circulation, JACC Lancet, Nature, and the European Heart Journal. Preliminary calculations of the impact factor for 2008 could possibly reach to 0.5. To improve our impact factor we hope to receive fine articles that deserve to be cited.