Dear EFMI and AIM Council Colleagues,

Ann (Moen) has kindly just passed on the notification that Methods (and Applied Clinical Informatics) have their Impact Factors back.  This is excellent news.   We all need to cite good quality informatics research as published in this and our other EFMI journals as much as possible.

The announcement reads as follows:

Methods of Information in Medicine and Applied Clinical Informatics, both official journals of the International Medical Informatics Association, are pleased to announce the return of their impact factors. For 2016, Methods of Information in Medicine's Impact factor is 1.772 and Applied Clinical Informatics' impact factor is 1.496

In 2016, Thomson Reuters informed the publisher that the 2015 Impact Factors of Methods of Information in Medicine and Applied Clinical Informatics would be suppressed for one year due to 'Citation Stacking', i.e. referencing between two journals of the same publisher. The editors immediately looked into this matter and identified it as an unintentional consequence of an ongoing effort to conduct research on translation of research from bench to bedside.

The editors of both journals, Sabine Koch, MSc, PhD and Christoph U Lehmann, MD, who incidentally were both elected to the founding class of the new International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics in 2017, are pleased to offer their readers again journals with impact factors and are looking forward to a continued close relationship among the journals.

If you want to read more about the citation stacking bear trap – please follow the following link: Lien

or see the brief editorial attached.

Simon de Lusignan
Professor of Primary Care & Clinical Informatics
Head of Department of Clinical and Experimental Medicine
Medical Director RCGP Research & Surveillance Centre (RSC)
Publications Officer European Federation for Medical Informatics
University of Surrey
Guildford GU2 7XH