PubMed, PubMed Central, and Impact Factor

Summary.

• •CMGH has been accepted for indexing in PubMed Central.
• •All articles, beginning with Volume 1, Issue 1, will be available in PubMed.
• •Full text will be available by clicking the DOI link below the abstract.
• •2017 citations of 2015 and 2016 CMGH articles will determine the Journal's initial impact factor, which is expected in the summer of 2018.

First, the big news. Cellular and Molecular Gastroenterology and Hepatology (CMGH) has been accepted for indexing in PubMed Central, making all CMGH articles, starting with Volume 1, Issue 1, searchable as full text in PubMed over the next several weeks.

Before explaining what this means, I want to begin by thanking those of you who have submitted to, reviewed for, read, or cited articles in CMGH. We are working to make this a premier forum for mechanistic, basic, and translational gastroenterology, liver, and pancreatic research. From comments that I, as well as Associate Editors Becky Wells and Jim Goldenring, have received, we are headed in the right direction in terms of the quality of work published and the collegial interactions between editors, authors, and reviewers. The auditors agree.

You may wonder what PubMed Central indexing means. We applied for early indexing as soon as we had sufficient articles and issues to be considered. Before this, some articles did appear in PubMed Central, but this occurred slowly because they were submitted as individual articles in accordance with National Institutes of Health and other funding body requirements, rather than as a formal indexing of the Journal. These articles appeared in PubMed, which is a central access point for articles in PubMed Central as well as other databases, eg Medline. With our acceptance for direct submission to PubMed Central, the full text of all articles, regardless of funding source, will appear in PubMed shortly after acceptance; a process we expect to be fully operational by the end of September. For CMGH articles already in PubMed, the link to full text in the upper right is not always present, but clicking on the DOI link below the abstract will take you to the full text.

One major consequence of CMGH being included in PubMed Central is that it will be easier to cite CMGH articles, which will, for example, be downloadable into EndNote and other reference manager software. The importance of citations to the Journal's success cannot be overstated. Following PubMed, the most common question I am asked relates to impact factor and when CMGH will have one. Impact factors are calculated as roughly the quotient of the number of citations during year 3 of manuscripts published in years 1 and 2 divided by the total number of manuscripts published in years 1 and 2. For CMGH, years 1, 2, and 3 are 2015, 2016, and 2017, respectively. Therefore, we anticipate the first CMGH impact factor to be released in the summer of 2018.

What can we do while we wait? The simple answer is, cite CMGH articles! Especially in 2017, it will be critical to cite articles published during 2015 and 2016. These citations will define the first impact factor that will mark CMGH as the rigorous journal it is. So, as a veteran of Chicago elections, I will take advantage of the season and encourage you to cite early and cite often!