BMJ impact report 2021 | Better evidence
Supporting faster and wider access to the latest evidence BMJ champions all improvements in the creation and dissemination of research evidence. But our journals reflect more than our expert editorial processes and the strength of our publishing platforms and channels. The policies and practices of our journals help shape the research evidence itself, potentially influencing everything from the selection of the research question to the final published text to the post-publication review. After such a challenging year, it is encouraging to see our portfolio increase its impact as judged by Impact Factor, most notably:
medRxiv: making preprints mainstream BMJ is a launch partner in the creation of medRxiv, and we’re proud of the role we’re playing to grow the openness and accessibility of scientific findings. medRxiv helps enhance collaboration among researchers, document the provenance of ideas, and inform ongoing and planned research through more timely reporting of completed research.
We want to reshape the way medical research is conducted and disseminated, and our co-founding of medRxiv with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Yale University is helping us to do that. We are guided by one of our five company values that the best decisions depend on the best evidence , so have made it our responsibility to deliver a service that goes way beyond providing mere repositories for the research output of others. We began to see the real impact of our foundation of medRxiv when covid-19 changed everything: traffic on medRxiv leapt from 1.1m to over 14m page views per month. As early as January 2020, it passed the 1,000 mark in articles posted, some of the very first available about the coronavirus outbreak in China. These were the first of many covid-19-related papers that drove the posting rate to double month-on-month between January and May in 2020. We inferred from this that there was a strong need for better evidence.
Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases Ranked 2nd of 34 Rheumatology journals for average citations
Gut Ranked 3rd of 92 Gastroenterology & Hepatology journals for average citations
“This free, independent service for all health scientists creates an opportunity for the medical research community to rapidly and responsibly share its latest research.”
The BMJ Ranked within the top 5 of all 169 general medical journals.
In 2020, The BMJ’s impact factor rose to 39.89 (up 9.577). Its Citescore is now 6.9. Moreover, 80% of all our journals indexed in Scopus 16 also increased their Citescore, and 34 of the 38 titles that have a journal impact factor received an increase.
Theodora Bloom , Executive Editor, The BMJ
Powered by FlippingBook