The proper use of citation data in journal management

Journal impact factors (IF) are often maligned in editorials found in scientific publications, yet citation data can be used appropriately in journal management. The editors of Laboratory Investigation have found that weekly tracking of citation data for this and other highly ranked pathology journals provides valuable feedback on editorial performance and enables us to predict accurate IFs at least six months in advance. Once the IFs are released, it is useful to quantify the contributions of specific article categories, such as reviews and research articles, to the official IFs. In an ongoing attempt to understand the relationship between article downloads and eventual citations, we also analyze the citation rate of papers that had previously been the most frequently accessed on our web site. Finally, as a measure of editorial judgment, the papers that contributed no citations to the journal's IF are examined as are the papers that were rejected by Laboratory Investigation (Lab. Invest.) but subsequently published elsewhere. Thus the editors of Lab. Invest. use citation data in several ways to measure our progress in elevating the quality of the journal and understand the citation dynamics of papers we publish, while remaining true to the journal's fundamental operating premise: publish high-quality original work relating to the mechanisms of disease.