Letter to the Editor

Sousa, Valmi D.; Cooksey-James, Tawna J.; Driessnack, Martha

doi:10.1016/j.outlook.2005.11.006

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Volume 54, Issue 2 , Page 67, March 2006

Letter to the Editor

The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA

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To the editor:

We applaud the recent editorial, Ratings and Rankings: Judging the Evaluation of Quality, published in the September/October issue of Nursing Outlook. The editorial explained and discussed an important ranking system, the journal impact factor, which is published in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI).¹ We would like to underscore what was said and make a few other points. In Broome’s editorial, the meaning and purpose of the JCR for evaluating journal quality was explained very well. We want to reiterate Broome’s call that while this ranking system reflects quality publications, it must be applied fairly by institutions when making important decisions about an individual’s scholarly performance,¹ especially since only 33 journals are presently covered in the JCR.²

This limited number of nursing journals is insufficient to accommodate the existing breadth of nursing scholarship. In addition, since 81.8% of the nursing journals currently indexed by ISI are published in the United States, with the remaining 12.1% from England and 6.1% from Scotland,² the emerging international nursing community may not have equal access or opportunity to publish quality scholarly work. The national and international community of nursing scholars has voiced concerns about the exclusive use of a nursing journal’s impact factor in judging the quality of publication. This is a timely issue for all nursing scholars, especially those who are impacted by university appointment, promotion, and tenure.

Let’s unite and place a call to all nursing journal editors and publishers to submit their journals for ISI evaluation. An increase in the number of quality nursing journals considered by ISI may provide more access and opportunity for the publication of quality work by national and international nursing scholars. What a global initiative!

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