Geum-Hee Jeong1, 3 and Sun Huh2, 3
1Department of Nursing and 2Parasitology, College of Medicine and 3Institute of Medical Education, Hallym University, Chuncheon 200-702, Korea
Purpose:We hypothesized that not open access but Pubmed Central (PMC) affects the citation frequency in the medical field. Since November 2008, medicaljournals from Korea began to be listed in PMC. Therefore, it would be interesting to know whether or not their impact factor by SCIE journals has increased since the journals were included in PMC.
Methods: To solve this question, a citation analysis of seven journals indexed in PMC in 2008 or 2009 was performed. To rule out the previous effect of Medline, only non-medline journals were selected. The impact factor was calculated via Web of Science and JCR. JCR data were used if the data of the target journals were provided in JCR. Out of seven journals, five are SCIE journals and two are non-SCIE journals. A paired t-test was done for the impact factors of different years.
Results: There has been a remarkable increase in the impact factor in 2010 over 2009 (p=0.0067). However, the rate of increase differs among the journals.
Conclusion: The best way for local medical journals, as exemplified in our study on those from Korea, to be cited by SCIE journals more frequently is to publish in English and to add them to PMC.