The ASJ Impact Factor: What You Need to Know

The ASJ impact factor (IF) has been on an upward trajectory for the past several years, with a consistently high number of citations. The IF is calculated from data indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection based on the number of citations (numerator) in 2022 over the number of source items published (denominator) for the previous 2 calendar years (in this case, 2020 and 2021). ASJ has enjoyed a high score and ranking among all journals published in the category Surgery, making it the number 1 journal in all of aesthetic surgery and the number 2 journal in all of plastic surgery. Last year, our IF was 4.485, ranking ASJ 62/212. This means that on average, every article in ASJ is cited 4.485 times.

A journal's IF has long been considered the gold standard for measuring the quality of academic journals in scholarly publishing and is a complement to expert opinion and informed peer review.¹ However, in the past decade alternative metrics have evolved rapidly, offering new points of view related to journals, articles, and how they are read, cited, and “consumed” worldwide.^1,2 For academics, publishing in a high-impact journal is not only encouraged but in some cases is required for promotion and tenure positions. This is particularly the case for European academics.

This year, the ASJ IF dropped to 3.1, with a 5-year IF of 3.5, and it is important to understand why. There are 3 primary reasons for the decrease: (1) clearing of a backlog that developed during the pandemic; (2) major changes made by Clarivate (London, UK), which calculates the IF scores; and (3) the addition of 9000 new journals to the pool of journals indexed by Clarivate, which reorganized rankings in this group. Clarivate also modified the IF metric, moving from a whole number followed by 3 decimal points to a whole number with only 1 decimal point—or a more rounded number. Nearly all indexed journals experienced a decline in their IF score, including other plastic surgery journals (Table). This editorial puts this all this into perspective, so our readership and members have a clear understanding. I also invite our readers to help us improve future IF scores by reading and citing articles in both ASJ and ASJ Open Forum. If you are an author or reviewer, I encourage your consideration of the inclusion of articles published in our journals, when appropriate, for this reason; such notes can be made within ScholarOne Manuscripts (Clarivate) during peer review or emailed directly to our editorial staff.

In 2021, Clarivate modified their algorithm which resulted in slightly inflated IF scores for journals universally. Of course this felt great at the moment, but it caused an even more dramatic variance between the scores of the past 2 years.

The cited half-life of ASJ is 5.2 years (median age of items in the journal that were cited during this IF period), which, in scholarly publishing, is considered to have a “long tail.” The benefits of a strong cited half-life are realized not only by the journal but by its authors, meaning that their articles have a long staying power in the plastic surgery literature.

ASJ is truly an international journal with more citing titles than any other plastic surgery journal (1170) compared with other competitive journals such as PRS (465), PRS Global Open (318), and APS (774).

ASJ is also very well cited internationally. After the US, the top countries citing ASJ content include China, England, Canada, Australia, Germany, Brazil, and France.

Another metric that Clarivate provides is a 5-year IF score, which for ASJ is 3.4. This metric is the average number of times articles from ASJ published in the past 5 years have been cited during the IF period. It is calculated by dividing the number of citations in the current IF period by the total number of articles published in the previous 5 years.

So, what can we do to help improve the IF score in future years? Our publisher, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), makes alternative metrics readily available for all ASJ and ASJ Open Forum articles. They can be accessed by clicking the colorful “donut” or metrics icon on the website shown in Figure.

The ASJ team has worked hard to promote content at the journal and article level, which we believe leads to increased usage (readership) and citations. We do so by promoting articles on our social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and by creating customized visual abstracts (VAs) or easy-to-read snapshots with quick takeaways and then sharing them broadly online and in print. We create VAs for every article published in ASJ Open Forum, which we believe makes the journal an industry leader, because no other journals to our knowledge do so. We have been honored to receive APEX and ASHPE awards based on this work over the past several years. We also believe that these efforts lead to high altmetrics scores for articles published in our journals, which yields attention that we hope leads to readership and citations. The highest altmetric score for all ASJ articles is for the Report on Mortality from Gluteal Fat Grafting: Recommendations from the ASERF Task Force, and the highest altmetric score for all ASJ Open Forum articles is for A Single-Center Study Evaluating the Effects of a Novel Retinol and Cannabidiol Combination Topical on Facial Skin.^3,4 As technology and multimedia continue to evolve, we will explore new opportunities to facilitate these alternative metrics and increase the impact factor so we can continue to produce high-quality and valuable journals for readers worldwide.

Disclosures

Ms Cress serves as executive publisher for the journals Aesthetic Surgery Journal and ASJ Open Forum.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and publication of this article.

REFERENCES

Author notes