Péter Jacsó - Savvy Searching: The Number Game (see article in PDF)

See the article in Online Information Review 24(2), 2000

Rank of Contemporary Psychology among psychology/psychiatry journals

Can a journal with only book reviews have the highest impact factor among 489 psychology and psychiatry journals?

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Having #2 rank among all the 1,679 social science journals monitored by ISI is even more unlikely.

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ISI calculates with only 3 "citable" articles in the 1996 issues of Contemporary Psychology (and 0 in the 1997 issues) This yields a very low denominator.

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Contemporary Psychology tells on its cover page that it is a journal of reviews. Indeed, it has only book reviews with few letters to the editor, editorial notes, rejoinders, and corrections. By ISI's policy -what I strongly contest- none of these should qualify in counting the "citable" research articles and literature review articles. Were there really three qualifying articles? No. See them below.

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Book review 1 identified as article by ISI

Contemporary Psychology, 1996. Vol. 41. No. 11, p. 1139 (excerpt)
This is a long one but clearly it is still a book review.

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 The document type ARTICLE was assigned in the bibliographic record instead of the correct term: BOOK REVIEW.

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Book review 2 identified as article by ISI

Contemporary Psychology, 1996. Vol. 41. No. 11, p. 1141 (excerpt)
This is unmistakably a book review

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Still, the document type assigned is ARTICLE.

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Book review 3 identified as article by ISI

Contemporary Psychology, 1996. Vol. 41. No. 11, p. 1142 (excerpt)

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The same error here: ARTICLE is the document type, but it is clearly a book review.
Had this error been made with only a single record Contemporary Psychology would have had an impact factor of 30, the highest among all the science and social science journals.

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