Background: The purposes of the authors' analysis were to assess the values that plastic surgical journals demonstrate in terms of the standardized measures created by the Institute for Scientific Information's Journal Citation Report, and to assess the relationship between these values and the turnaround time of these journals.
Methods: The overall indexes of surgical journals were compared with those of journals in other fields of medicine using the following parameters: highest impact factor, average impact factor, cited half-life, immediacy index, and number of journals. Similarly, plastic surgery journals were compared with the highest ranking journals from various fields of surgery. In addition, an evaluation of all original articles published in 2005, assessing the time intervals from submission to publication, submission to acceptance, and acceptance to publication, was conducted for all plastic surgical journals and the highest ranking journals from various surgical fields listed in the Journal Citation Report.
Results: Plastic surgical journals demonstrated low overall index values and a greater elongation of their turnaround time in comparison to journals in other fields of surgery and medicine.
Conclusions: The fact that the field of plastic surgery targets a rather specific and limited medical audience, and that plastic surgical articles usually get quoted by this audience, partly explains these values. Furthermore, the elongated turnaround time contributes to their endurance. Since plastic surgical journals cannot attract a broader medical audience, journals should speed up their publication times to help these values rise.