"Wiener klinische Wochenschrift": publication patterns 1990-2000

The impact factor (Institute for Scientific Information, ISI, Philadelphia, PA, USA) is a widespread used and acknowledged source for judging the quality of a researcher. In addition the "Science Citation Index (SCI)" [Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)] provides the scientific community with a citations database indicating the number of cited references in indexed articles. For several reasons, the SCI seems to be more relevant. To evaluate the quality of the journal "Wiener klinische Wochenschrift", we assessed how often contributors to this journal have been cited during the last decade and which contributions have ranked as top papers. Moreover, with the aim of a more objective type of scientific evaluation, we have employed a new score, the "Citation Per Time Score (CPT-Score--the SCI divided by the number of years of observation, starting one year after publication). We have evaluated the total SCI for the years 1990 to 1994 and for the years 1995 to 1999. The number of total citations between the appearance of an article and the year 2000 was analyzed. The highest ranked publication of the whole decade (1990-2000) was a paper by G. Stanek with 40 citations. Furthermore, we have evaluated the "Top Ten Papers" of the journal. Interestingly, a steady increase of the total citation index of the journal "Wiener klinische Wochenschrift" over the last decade could be demonstrated. This study clearly shows that the citation rate of an article is not determined by the impact factor of the journal but rather the quality of the contribution. Moreover, the citation analysis of papers published in the last ten years in the "Wiener klinische Wochenschrift" shows a satisfactory citation rate for articles published in this journal. It is therefore definitely attractive to submit an article to a journal such as the "Wiener klinische Wochenschrift".