Neurobiology with caged calcium.
Impact factor (IF) is a strange and somewhat controversial metric. I have been accused of being a bit too obsessed with it. (Recall, IF=citations of a journal's papers from 2005 in 2006-07/number of papers published in 2005.) If one wants to do science that actually has impact, how can we judge our effectiveness? IF is certainly one objective means of trying to track the significance of a paper.
In the field of chemistry most journals have an IF of less than 5. JACS, Nano Letters, Angewandte Chemie, and Advanced Materials have IF of 7-10 (Angew is the tops, but its IF is boosted by having reviews, which JACS does not). The only chemistry journal with an IF>20 is Chemical Reviews. The Grand Dame of chemistry review journals has an IF=26. The May 2008 issue of Chem. Rev. is a "special" devoted to "Chemistry and Neuroscience". I wrote a contribution to this, at the invitation of the guest editor, Dirk Trauner (soon to move to Munich, apparently!). I want to thank Dirk for the honor of asking me to be part of this issue, and one of the reviewers of my review (who I suspect was Jakob Sorensen), for all the effort he put into correcting my mistakes!
"Neurobiology with Caged Calcium" Chemical Reviews (2008) 10.1021/cr078210i
Impact factor (IF) is a strange and somewhat controversial metric. I have been accused of being a bit too obsessed with it. (Recall, IF=citations of a journal's papers from 2005 in 2006-07/number of papers published in 2005.) If one wants to do science that actually has impact, how can we judge our effectiveness? IF is certainly one objective means of trying to track the significance of a paper.
In the field of chemistry most journals have an IF of less than 5. JACS, Nano Letters, Angewandte Chemie, and Advanced Materials have IF of 7-10 (Angew is the tops, but its IF is boosted by having reviews, which JACS does not). The only chemistry journal with an IF>20 is Chemical Reviews. The Grand Dame of chemistry review journals has an IF=26. The May 2008 issue of Chem. Rev. is a "special" devoted to "Chemistry and Neuroscience". I wrote a contribution to this, at the invitation of the guest editor, Dirk Trauner (soon to move to Munich, apparently!). I want to thank Dirk for the honor of asking me to be part of this issue, and one of the reviewers of my review (who I suspect was Jakob Sorensen), for all the effort he put into correcting my mistakes!
"Neurobiology with Caged Calcium" Chemical Reviews (2008) 10.1021/cr078210i
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