Anesthesia & Analgesia, the official journal of the International Anesthesia Research Society (IARS), reports continued increase in its Impact Factor, the rating of academic and scientific journals tracked and published annually by Thomson Reuters.
The Journal's 2010 Impact Factor increased from 3.08 to 3.27. The journal's Immediacy Index, which measures citations of the journal's articles within one year of publication, and its Eigenfactor score, which "assesses the journal's total importance to the scientific community" (as defined by Thompson Reuters) are the highest among all anesthesiology journals.
"For nearly 100 years, Anesthesia & Analgesia has supported our peers and advanced patient care by publishing timely, relevant and clinically valuable research and clinical reports," said editor in chief Steven L. Shafer, MD. "Our current ranking is a welcome validation of the efforts of our contributors, reviewers, editors, and staff."
A journal's impact factor is the ratio of the number of citations in the previous year to articles published in the two prior years to the total number of citable articles in the two prior years. The impact factor is often used to rank the relative importance and scientific caliber of a journal within its field. The impact factor of a Journal is not an assessment of the quality of any particular article. The Impact Factor was originally devised by the Institute for Scientific Information, now part of Thomson Reuters. Impact factors are calculated yearly for those journals that are indexed in Thomson Reuter's Journal Citation Reports.
Over the past five years, Anesthesia & Analgesia's impact factor has steadily increased by approximately 50%, from 2.1 in 2006 to 3.3 in 2010.