BMC and impact

We’re proud of the impact our journals have - from citations to social media shares; from advancing discovery within individual disciplines to affecting public discourse and policymaking. On this page you can find some information and resources on BMC journals' metrics and impact.

BMC is a signatory of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment

In 2017 BMC became a signatory of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), the commitment to move away from a single measure of a journal’s impact (Impact Factor) to the provision of a wider set of metrics and measurements.

What other journal metrics are available?

A number of journal-level metrics have emerged over recent years in an effort to broaden the evaluation of scholarly journals. The list below provides a brief explanation of the metrics we display (where available) on our journal websites.

Speed and usage are updated early in the calendar year and reflect the previous calendar year. Citation impact details are updated in the middle of the calendar year following the release of these metrics by both Clarivate Analytics and Scopus.

Speed

Days to first decision for reviewed manuscripts only: Mean average number of days from submission to first decision for reviewed manuscripts in the publisher’s online system.

Days to first decision for all manuscripts: Mean average number of days from submission to first decision for all manuscripts in the publisher’s online system.

Days from submission to acceptance: Mean average number of days from submission to acceptance for all accepted manuscripts in the publisher’s online system.

Days from acceptance to publication: Mean average number of days from acceptance to online publication. This number takes into account all articles published in the calendar year.

Citation impact

2-year Impact Factor: Metric calculated by Clarivate Analytics and available in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) product. The 2-year journal Impact Factor is the average number of times articles from the journal published in the past two years have been cited in the JCR year. It is calculated by dividing the number of citations in the JCR year by the total number of articles published in the two previous years.

5-year Impact Factor: Metric calculated by Clarivate Analytics and available in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) product. The 5-year journal Impact Factor is the average number of times articles from the journal published in the past five years have been cited in the JCR year. It is calculated by dividing the number of citations in the JCR year by the total number of articles published in the five previous years.

SNIP (Source-Normalized Impact per Paper): This metric includes all journals contained in the Scopus® database from 1996. The SNIP measures a source’s contextual citation impact by weighing citations based on the total number of citations in a subject field. It helps to make a direct comparison of sources in different subject fields. SNIP especially considers the frequency at which authors cite other papers in their reference lists, the speed at which citation impact matures and the extent to which the database used in the assessment covers the field’s literature. More information about SNIP.

SJR (SCImago Journal Rank): This metric includes all journals contained in the Scopus® database from 1996. The SJR measures weighted citations received by the journal. Weightings depend on the subject field and prestige (SJR) of the citing journal and in general, self-citations are not included in the calculation and citation weighting. More information about SJR.

CiteScore: This metric is provided by Elsevier using data from Scopus® and is the average citations per document that a title receives over a three-year period. It is calculated as the number of citations received in the given year to documents published in the previous three years, divided by the number of documents for the three years.

Usage

Downloads: Downloads reflect the number of times full text or PDF versions of articles are accessed directly from the journal website and Springer Link. Downloads are defined as HTML, LookInside, PDF and Epub clicks. Please note that this does not include article downloads from mirror databases such as PubMed Central.

Altmetric Mentions: Total number of mentions (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Reddit, Blogs, News articles, Policy documents and Faculty of 1000 reviews) for articles published in the specified timeframe, as provided by Altmetric.

What does compliancy with DORA mean in practice?

BMC has been compliant with the majority of DORA recommendations for some time, and a commitment to reducing emphasis on Impact Factor is the final step in enacting DORA practices in research assessment. We are committed to the following recommendations:

Greatly reduce emphasis on the journal impact factor as a promotional tool, ideally by ceasing to promote the impact factor or by presenting the metric in the context of a variety of journal-based metrics that provide a richer view of journal performance.
Make available a range of article-level metrics to encourage a shift toward assessment based on the scientific content of an article rather than publication metrics of the journal in which it was published.
Encourage responsible authorship practices and the provision of information about the specific contributions of each author.

Find out what the entire declaration means here.