BACKGROUND: The aim of this work was to show that some bibliometric indexes, such as the Impact Factor and citation analysis, are useful for the evaluation of the scientific impact of psychiatric journals. Such indexes may also be used in the evaluation of scientific productivity of individuals. METHODS: The impact factors of psychiatric journals of 1995 and 1997 were obtained through the "Journal of Citation Reports"â. The distribution of their means was analyzed using histograms and box-plots. The means both evaluations were compared by a Wilcoxon sum-rank test. RESULTS: The distribution curves the impact factors of psychiatric journals showed to be very skewed. The average mean of impact factors of psychiatric journals in both evaluations was 1.5. There was a significant increase of the mean of the impact factors of psychiatric journals between 1995 and 1997 (W=57 p=0.026). Three periodicals ("Archives of General Psychiatry", "American Journal of Psychiatry" and the "Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology") are consistently the outliers in both evaluations. CONCLUSIONS: Impact factors are the best indexes for the evaluation of the scientific influence of psychiatric journals. However, for individual evaluations of scientific productivity a citation analysis must be added.
Periodicals; psychiatry; impact factor; citation analysis; bibliometry
