The Journal of Nutritional Science (JNS) was launched some 9 years ago, the first articles appearing in February 2012. The journal was jointly established by the Nutrition Society and Cambridge University Press as a pioneering Open Access forum covering the full spectrum of nutritional science. At the beginning, it was closely linked with the British Journal of Nutrition, established 74 years ago in 1947, with a common Editor-in-Chief and Editorial Board. The role of Editor-in-Chief is no longer shared between the two journals, although there is still considerable overlap in the composition of the Editorial Boards.
JNS has attracted a wide range of studies, and some articles have been highly cited. Indeed, a review paper on flavonoids by Panche et al. in 2016(Reference Panche, Diwan and Chandra1) has, at the time of writing, received >450 citations according to the Scopus and Web of Science databases (and with a high ‘Altmetrics score’ for those engaging with this metric). Citations are, of course, a reflection of interest and influence – of ‘impact’. There are several databases which provide data on citation impact, whether for individual articles or for specific journals, particularly Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate), CiteScore (Elsevier), Google Scholar and Dimensions. CiteScore, which is one of the more recent, was launched in December 2016 as part of Scopus – itself a comprehensive database of peer-reviewed research.
CiteScore has several attractions, including that it covers a window of 4 years (originally 3), the 2019 figures being based on articles published in 2016–19; a period of 3 years is considered to cover the citation peak in the majority of disciplines(Reference Lancho-Barrantes, Guerrero-Bote and Moya-Anegón2). A further major attraction is that a CiteScore is provided once a journal is included within the Scopus database, no special request or evaluation is required. As a consequence, it can become available soon after a new journal is successfully launched.
JNS has had a CiteScore essentially since the inception of the database and the metrics for 2019 were released in June 2020, as calculated by Scopus on 31 May of this year. I am delighted to say that our journal has done extremely well – a value of 9⋅4. It should be noted that CiteScore employs only a single decimal place in order to avoid an inappropriate sense of precision.
CiteScore currently lists JNS under two subject areas: ‘Agricultural and Biological Sciences – Food Science’, where it ranks 9th out of 299 (97th percentile), and ‘Medicine – Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism’, where it is ranked 20th out of 217 (91st percentile). Most other nutrition journals are listed under ‘Nursing – Nutrition and Dietetics’ where JNS would now rank 7th out of 120 (93rd percentile); we have requested that it is also included under this category. In each case, JNS would rank in the 1st quartile of journals in the designated subject area; indeed, it would rank in the top 10 %. Such high rankings clearly represent an exceptional performance on the part of JNS, which I very much hope that our authors – both past and future – will appreciate.
I would also like to highlight that JNS is now willing to publish articles that report negative results – providing that they make a genuine contribution to nutritional knowledge (and are, of course, scientifically sound). Such articles might challenge current perspectives, for example, or demonstrate the inability to reproduce important recent findings. This adds to the type of article that we currently publish – ‘Primary Research Papers’, ‘Brief Reports’, ‘Review Articles’, ‘Systematic Reviews’, ‘Perspectives in Nutritional Science’, ‘Workshop Reports’, ‘Letters to the Editor’ and ‘Obituaries’ – although most submissions reporting negative results are likely to be ‘Primary Research Papers’ or ‘Brief Reports’. We look forward to receiving manuscripts in this new category.
Open access
