Crazy stuff going down at the CMAJ!

[MJM - Editor]

The Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ), ranked I believe #5 in impact around the world as a general medical journal, has fired its Editor-in-Chief and deputy under very questionable circumstances. That is to say that the owner of the journal, the Canadian Medical Association (CMA), has done the axing.
The interim Editor has now just resigned along with one more senior editor.

What the hell's going on at the CMA????
Certainly seems like blatant editorial intereference.

Both the Lancet and the BMJ have weighed in on the topic this week.

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[PickyBicky]

The Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ), ranked I believe #5 in impact around the world as a general medical journal, has fired its Editor-in-Chief and deputy under very questionable circumstances. That is to say that the owner of the journal, the Canadian Medical Association (CMA), has done the axing.
The interim Editor has now just resigned along with one more senior editor.

What the hell's going on at the CMA????
Certainly seems like blatant editorial intereference.

Both the Lancet and the BMJ have weighed in on the topic this week.

I was curious about your comment that the CMAJ is ranked 5th for general medicine journals. Close... below, for curiosity's sake, is the most recent ISI impact factors for general medical journals from the ISI website. It takes two years of citations to generate an impact factor, so 2004 is the most recent data available. The furthest number to the right is the impact factor in each row. As a benchmark of comparison for people who are not yet in their clinical years and are more familiar with the basic journals, Nature is in the mid 30s, Cell in the low 30s, Science in the high 20s, and PNAS in the low teens. Specialty medical journals (for Surg, ortho, derm, peds, whatever) will generally be lower than the general medical journals because...well, fewer people read and cite papers from those journals.

-PB

Mark Rank Abbreviated
Journal Title
(linked to journal information) ISSN Total Cites
Impact
Factor Immediacy
Index Articles Cited
Half-life
1 NEW ENGL J MED 0028-4793 159498 38.570
2 JAMA-J AM MED ASSOC 0098-7484 88864 24.831
3 LANCET 0140-6736 126002 21.713
4 ANN INTERN MED 0003-4819 36932 13.114
5 ANNU REV MED 0066-4219 3188 11.200
6 ARCH INTERN MED 0003-9926 26525 7.508
7 BRIT MED J 0959-535X 56807 7.038 3.039 623 7.3

8 CAN MED ASSOC J 0820-3946 6736 5.941

9 AM J MED 0002-9343 21000 4.179
10 MAYO CLIN PROC 0025-6196 6816 3.746
11 MEDICINE 0025-7974 4255 3.727
12 ANN MED 0785-3890 2626 3.617
13 J INTERN MED 0954-6820 4793 3.590

14 AM J PREV MED 0749-3797 3972 3.188
15 CURR MED RES OPIN 0300-7995 1148 2.928
16 J GEN INTERN MED 0884-8734 4686 2.821
17 QJM-INT J MED 1460-2725 4073 2.580
18 EUR J CLIN INVEST 0014-2972 4332 2.530
19 PREV MED 0091-7435 5372 2.327
20 J PAIN SYMPTOM MANAG 0885-3924 2941 2.187

 

[PickyBicky]

I was curious about your comment that the CMAJ is ranked 5th for general medicine journals. Close... below, for curiosity's sake, is the most recent ISI impact factors for general medical journals from the ISI website. It takes two years of citations to generate an impact factor, so 2004 is the most recent data available. The furthest number to the right is the impact factor in each row. As a benchmark of comparison for people who are not yet in their clinical years and are more familiar with the basic journals, Nature is in the mid 30s, Cell in the low 30s, Science in the high 20s, and PNAS in the low teens. Specialty medical journals (for Surg, ortho, derm, peds, whatever) will generally be lower than the general medical journals because...well, fewer people read and cite papers from those journals.

-PB

Mark Rank Abbreviated
Journal Title
(linked to journal information) ISSN Total Cites
Impact
Factor Immediacy
Index Articles Cited
Half-life
1 NEW ENGL J MED 0028-4793 159498 38.570
2 JAMA-J AM MED ASSOC 0098-7484 88864 24.831
3 LANCET 0140-6736 126002 21.713
4 ANN INTERN MED 0003-4819 36932 13.114
5 ANNU REV MED 0066-4219 3188 11.200
6 ARCH INTERN MED 0003-9926 26525 7.508
7 BRIT MED J 0959-535X 56807 7.038 3.039 623 7.3

8 CAN MED ASSOC J 0820-3946 6736 5.941

9 AM J MED 0002-9343 21000 4.179
10 MAYO CLIN PROC 0025-6196 6816 3.746
11 MEDICINE 0025-7974 4255 3.727
12 ANN MED 0785-3890 2626 3.617
13 J INTERN MED 0954-6820 4793 3.590

14 AM J PREV MED 0749-3797 3972 3.188
15 CURR MED RES OPIN 0300-7995 1148 2.928
16 J GEN INTERN MED 0884-8734 4686 2.821
17 QJM-INT J MED 1460-2725 4073 2.580
18 EUR J CLIN INVEST 0014-2972 4332 2.530
19 PREV MED 0091-7435 5372 2.327
20 J PAIN SYMPTOM MANAG 0885-3924 2941 2.187

Personally, I keep the Journal of Pain Symptom Management behind the camode for easy reference on my down time.

-PB

 

[MJM - Editor]

You're quite right, PB. By the ISI rankings for general and internal medicine CMAJ is at #8.

I should clarify where the #5 comes from, then.
Well, as I said, CMAJ is ranked fifth "as a general medical journal".
The ISI category posted is general and internal medicine. Which includes some very slightly different journals.

#5 on the list, for example, is the Annual Review of Medicine, which is - as the title suggests - an annual publication. It would therefore stand to reason that it is not a comparable publication to, say, the Lancet or the NEJM, which publish (at least to my knowledge) a fair bit more than once a year. The Annual Review is important and has great impact, no question, but is not directly comparable to some of its "list-mates".

Then, on the more nit-picky side, it can be argued that both the Annals of Internal Medicine as well as the Archives of Internal Medicine are in fact journals of internal medicine - and not general medical journals.

It is with such reasoning that some choose to suggest that the CMAJ is currently ranked fifth in the world for impact compared to other general medical journals, behind the BMJ, the Lancet, the JAMA, and the NEJM.

So, the bottom line here: who cares? (well, probably the publishers and advertisers, but whatever). Both #8 and #5 seem correct as rankings.
The differences in rankings we've just presented are simply differences in semantics, and help to illustrate how questionable the utility of such rankings can be (not to mention differences in opinion on actual measurement indices for impact!).


(Just as a sideline, I'd like to point out that I personally couldn't care less where the CMAJ is ranked. I just care about editorial independance!)

 

[MJM - Editor]

Personally, I keep the Journal of Pain Symptom Management behind the camode for easy reference on my down time.

-PB

And I thought I was the only one who did that!

 

[uacharya]

And I thought I was the only one who did that!

Nope, I do it as well