10 Year Trend in Nutrition Journal Impact Indexes in the World

This study was performed to evaluate the impact of factors and the total citations of ISI-indexed on nutrition journals in the last 10 years.

To perform this retrospective study, the impact factor and the total citation data were collected through Journal Citation Reports of Thomson Scientific Corporation Web of Knowledge. Five highly cited journals in "nutrition and dietetics" category were selected for the analysis. These journals include Annual Reviews in Nutrition (ANNU REV NUTR), American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (AJCN), Progress in Lipid Research (PROG LIPID RES), Journal of Nutrition (J NUTR) and International Journal of Obesity (INT J OBESITY).

All five selected journals were ranked as one of the top ten nutrition and dietetics journals between 1999 and 2008 in ISI category. Most of the selected journal's impact factor have upward trend during the 10 years period with fluctuation in some cases. Am J Clin Nutr had consistently the highest total citation trend during these years.

Impact factor is a useful yardstick to compare quality of nutrition journals and also to compare the performance of the top journals in this category.