Effect of published papers by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation on the impact factor of The Lancet journal.

Kaldas and colleagues discussed the advantages and disadvantages of journal impact factor (IF) in a recent review.1 As another limitation for journal IF, a recent article by Lei and Sun showed the effect of highly-cited items on journal IF calculation.2 Here, we want to investigate the effect of a series of highly cited items, namely papers affiliated with the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), on The Lancet journal’s IF. Published papers by the IHME (University of Washington’s School of Medicine, Seattle, WA, USA) provide a comprehensive picture of health status worldwide.3 These papers can be repeatedly cited by health policymakers and researchers, which can in turn lead to these papers attracting many citations. Each year, studies on the global burden of …