The latest results from the annual impact factor boxing world championship contest are out. This is a combat sport where scientific journals are scored according to their supposed influence and impact in Science. This years competition rankings include the first-ever update to the newly introduced Five Year Impact Factor and Eigenfactor™ Metrics [1,2] in Journal Citation Reports (JCR) on the Web (see www.isiknowledge.com/JCR warning: clunky website requires subscription*), presumably in response to widespread criticism of impact factors. The Eigenfactor™ seems to correlate quite closely with the impact factor scores, both of which work at the level of the journal, although they use different methods for measuring a given journals impact. However, what many authors are often more interested in is the impact of an individual article, not the journal where it was published. So it would be interesting to see how the figures below tally with Google Scholar, see also comments by Abhishek Tiwari. I’ve included a table below of bioinformatics impact factors, updated for June 2009. Of course, when I say 2009 (today), I mean 2008 (these are the latest figures available based on data from 2007) – so this shiny new information published this week is already out of date [3] and flawed [4,5] but here is a selection of the data anyway:

Journal Title	JCR Data						Eigenfactor™ Metrics
	Total Cites	Impact Factor	5-Year Impact Factor	Immediacy Index	Articles	Cited Half-life	Eigenfactor™Score	Article Influence™ Score
BMC Bionformatics	8141	3.781	4.246	0.664	607	2.8	0.06649	1.730
OUP Bioinformatics	30344	4.328	6.481	0.566	643	4.8	0.18204	2.593
Briefings in Bioinformatics	2908	4.627		1.273	44	4.5	0.02188
PLoS Computational Biology	2730	5.895	6.144	0.826	253	2.1	0.03063	3.370
Genome Biology	9875	6.153	7.812	0.961	229	4.4	0.07930	3.858
Nucleic Acids Research	86787	6.878	6.968	1.635	1070	6.5	0.37108	2.963
PNAS	416018	9.380	10.228	1.635	3508	7.4	1.69893	4.847
Science	409290	28.103	30.268	6.261	862	8.4	1.58344	16.283
Nature	443967	31.434	31.210	8.194	899	8.5	1.76407	17.278

The internet is radically changing the way we communicate and this includes scientific publishing, as media mogul Rupert Murdoch once pointed out big will not beat small any more – it will be the fast beating the slow.  An interesting question for publishers and scientists is, how can the Web help the faster flyweight and featherweight boxers (smaller journals) compete and punch-above-their-weight with the reigning world champion heavyweights (Nature, Science and PNAS)? Will the heavyweight publishers always have the killer knockout punches? If you’ve got access to the internet, then you already have a ringside seat from which to watch all the action. This fight should be entertaining viewing and there is an awful lot of money riding on the outcome [6-11].

Seconds away, round two…