BIB's first impact factor is 24.37

Abstract

We are delighted to announce that Briefings in Bioinformatics has just received its first impact factor—of 24.37! This is a fantastic achievement for the journal, and surely a reflection of the tremendous impact of bioinformatics on biology. The journal continues to publish significant and timely reviews across a wide range of topics—including a recent special issue on Systems Biology, with a forthcoming special issue on Knowledge Integration and Web Communities. A large number of citations in 2006 (>800) were received by a very highly cited article published in 2004: Kumar S, Tamura K & Nei M (2004) MEGA3: Integrated Software for Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis and Sequence Alignment,Briefings in Bioinformatics, Vol. 5, 150–163. MEGA is an integrated tool used in diverse disciplines for sequence alignment, inferring phylogenetic trees, mining databases, estimating rates of molecular evolution and testing evolutionary hypotheses; it is consequently highly cited. We are of course delighted that BIB attracted such a high-impact article and we hope to publish similarly ‘hot’ articles in the future. We think it is important, however, to also show how strong the impact factor would have been without the MEGA3 article. If this article were omitted from the 2006 impact factor calculation, BIB would have an impact factor of ∼4—still a very good result for the journal's first, demonstrating the overall quality of this young publication. We would like to thank our authors for their support in helping to make BIB a success. Whatever BIB's impact factor, we will continue to ensure that the journal's impact, quality and relevance remain high and take feedback from our readers as the most important measure of the journal's success.