Measuring the growing impact of BOSEM : halfway there or living on a prayer?

Abstract

Comparison is often cited as the thief of joy. However, in academic publishing, comparing the quality and impact of scholarly journals through metrics can help you choose the most impactful journal to entrust your scientific work. Naturally, the quality and impact of a journal cannot be captured in a single value; consequently, various metrics exist. For example, BMJ Open Sport and Exercise Medicine (BOSEM) ranks 36th out of 218 journals in the field of Physical Therapy, Sports Therapy and Rehabilitation; we have a CiteScore of 4.6 and a Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) of 1.294. Another way of looking at our impact is to consider the number of visitors our Open Access content draws. So far this year (January to June 2022), we welcomed 349 629 page views. This foresees again an increase compared with 2021 (647 451 page views) and 2020 (517 858 page views). Are you starting to get dizzy yet? We have not touched on arguably the most important metric, the Journal Impact Factor (JIF). You may have noticed that BOSEM, as yet, has not been awarded this metric. The BOSEM Editorial Board would like to explain why, as well as measure the growing impact of BOSEM via our own ‘unofficial’ JIF calculation.