Journal

A few days ago, my friend VW put up a list of journals and compared the change in their impact factors over the past 10 years. (See http://vwswong.blogspot.com/2011/01/time-capsule.html)

The list is illuminating to say the least. I shall not elaborate on the problem of impact factor and other measures to compare journal performance. (On this, interested visitors of this site should read Citation bubble about to burst? by Jürgen Schmidhuber published on 6th January 2011 in Nature.) But, I just want to show this - the list of journals that I subscribe and read:

• New England Journal of Medicine
• The Lancet
• Journal Watch
• Nature Medicine
• Nature
• Journal of the American Society of Nephrology
• Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology
• Kidney International
• Nature Reviews Nephrology
• American Journal of Kidney Disease
• Peritoneal Dialysis International

There are a few others that I receive the free copy and would thumb through regularly. In fact, the list grows with years. When I was a trainee in 1993, NEJM was the only one I subscribed.

One of the eternal puzzle that I wish to resolve, in fact, is how to tackle the information overload.

PS. When I received the first subscribed copy of Kidney International in 1995 (shortly after I began my training in nephrology), I found it written in a language of the aliens. I told my feeling to the man who still had a moustache, and his response was remarkable:

"If you could understand 80% of all the titles, you could be called fully trained."

I was slightly taken aback.

After a moment of silence, he added, "By the way, I do not read journal articles - I write them."