The Journal Impact Factor (IF) data have been released for the 2022 year. IF has traditionally been the most quoted metric for comparing journals and judging their value in various scientific fields. As most readers know, IF is calculated from data over a 3-year period. The latest IF for Pharmacotherapy reflects citations in the biomedical literature in 2022 from citable articles published in the journal in 2020 and 2021. Several changes in the calculation and presentation of data have been made this year. First, the number of significant figures in the IF has been reduced to one decimal place. Second, many journals have an IF calculated for the first time that previously were excluded from consideration. Third, the way that citable articles are included in the IF calculation has changed to consider early-view or online articles published before the final version appears. This affects the citation rate of articles posted online that are accepted during the latter months of one year but may not appear as a final version in a journal issue until the following calendar year.

Clarivate Analytics, the biomedical organization that produces the IF data, previously announced that many journals could expect a decrease in the 2022 IF after increases in 2021. This was predictable because of high citations from COVID-19 publications and the revised method of IF calculation. Newly released IF data for Pharmacotherapy are shown in the table that follows.

The IF of Pharmacotherapy dropped in this year’s report. As expected, this trend was apparent across many journal categories in the Clarivate report. Some perspective can be gained by comparing Pharmacotherapy’s IF with those of other journals in the Clarivate journal category of Pharmacology and Pharmacy. Pharmacotherapy has maintained its relative position of second in IF ranking among its competitors (Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics, Clinical and Translational Science, British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, Clinical Therapeutics, Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, European Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, Annals of Pharmacotherapy, and American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy).

Pharmacotherapy has a record of sustained increases in its IF in recent years. From 2013 to 2018, the IF improved from 2.2 to 3.0, exceeding 3.0 for the first time in 2017. Many factors contribute to the status of Pharmacotherapy as a major journal publishing research and reviews that advance the scientific record of clinical pharmacology. These include the contributions of ACCP members, an increasing author pool outside pharmacy and outside North America, and an extensive pool of manuscript reviewers. The editorial board and scientific editors are acknowledged authorities in their areas of specialization and are essential to the journal’s success.

A trend in the biomedical publishing industry is to broaden the metrics used to evaluate and compare the importance of scientific journals. For example, Clarivate introduced a companion metric to the Journal Impact Factor 2 years ago titled the “Journal Citation Indicator” (“JCI”). The JCI metric is a normalized average across all journals in a specific category (e.g., Pharmacology and Pharmacy) and considers data over 4 years rather than 3. A value of 1.0 indicates the journal performs better than average, 2.0 indicates the journal performs twice as well as average, and 0.5 indicates the journal performs half as well as average. The 2022 JCI values of the eight comparator journals named above ranged from 0.53 to 1.58. Pharmacotherapy’s value was 1.01, with 0.69 being the mean value of the other eight journals. Similar to the IF, Pharmacotherapy ranks second in JCI among clinical pharmacology journals.

In addition to Clarivate metrics, other metrics to assess a journal’s impact include the Scopus CiteScore, article downloads, article Altmetrics score, and international readership. These will be presented and discussed in a future report.