Comparative analysis between impact factor and h-index for psychiatry journals

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Objective: Journal Impact Factor (IF) is well known for being the document measure of scientific journal impact, despite several recognised limitations. Our study tried to propose a new rating system (journal h-index) applied to a sample of psychiatry journals and compared to IF. Method: In order to strictly compare their IF and h-index using the same data, we wanted to work on all the citations obtained in 2006 by the articles published in 2004-2005 in the 50 journals of our Web of Science sample of psychiatry. We studied the statistical correlation between the IF 2006 and h-index 2006. Results: The rankings of the 50 psychiatry journals were different when we took into account respectively the descending order of IF 2006 and h-index 2006 which revealed 16 steps and therefore 16 groups of journals. We noted that two journals were up 21 places (record) in h-index 2006 ranking and one journal lost 17 places. Nevertheless we obtained a high correlation coefficient well illustrated by the group of the seven first journals whose the two rankings were very close. We noted that our sample had only two journals really specialised in the publication of reviews. Conclusions: The rating of journals starting from the h-index may represent an interesting and complementary alternative to the well-known rating based on the IF. The h-index rating proposes a categorization of journals making it possible to create classes of journals with the same h-index. This type of ranking by classes is often appreciated and used by experts and scientific committees of evaluation.