On occasion of the journal’s 5th anniversary in 2012, we published an editorial that included the following historic statement [5]:

“The first international editorial board meeting for Patient Safety in Surgery took place on October 3, 2012, at the Clinical Congress of the American College of Surgeons (ACS) in Chicago, IL. During this meeting, we discussed current challenges and outlined the future vision for the journal in the next 5 years. One priority is to take the journal from its first unofficial impact factor of 1.19 to an official impact factor in the Journal Citation Reports.”

On June 28, 2023, after a wait time of almost 16 years since November 7, 2007, Patient Safety in Surgery received the first Journal Impact Factor (JIF) of 3.7 by Clarivate Journal Citation Reports™. The JIF is calculated as the number of citations of articles published in the journal during the preceding two years (numerator) divided by the number of citable articles in the journal during the same time-window (denominator). The citable items in the denominator are reflective of the scholarly contributions of the journal, including original research, case reports, and review articles. In contrast, editorials and letters which serve a different communication role outside of scholarly activity are excluded from the denominator. For calculation of the current impact factor for Patient Safety in Surgery, articles published in 2020 and 2021 were cited 265 times in 2022, divided by a total of 72 citable articles published in 2020 and 2021, resulting in a respectable impact factor of 3.7. While the time-window of the two preceding years defines the standard impact factor, some journals with a slower velocity of reaching citation peaks prefer to leverage the 5-year impact factor, which is reflective of the years 2017–2021 for the 2022 JIF (Fig. 4). The new JIF for Patient Safety in Surgery implies that an average article published in the journal has been cited about 3.7 times within two years after publication. The top-5 most cited articles which contributed to the new JIF for Patient Safety in Surgery are listed in Table 1. Notably, these citations are exclusively reflective of review articles which are preferentially cited in other publications. Impressively, 68 of 72 citable articles in 2020–2021 were cited at least once, extrapolating to a citation rate of 94% for the journal. Only four original papers published in the journal during 2020 and 2021 were not cited in 2022. The stratification of the 68 cited articles by publication type, specialty area, and country of origin is shown in Table 2. The most cited article with 172 citations was an editorial entitled “How to risk-stratify elective surgery during the COVID-19 pandemic?” which was published shortly after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) as a global pandemic in March 2020 [6]. However, since editorials represent non-citable items, this article was not included for the 2022 JIF tracking (as this current editorial will be excluded as well). The #1 ranking citable article published during the 2020–2021 JIF time-window was cited 58 times in 2022, after its publication on May 1, 2021, and 100 times overall until present [7]. This review article was published around the peak of the global controversy around the safety and efficacy of the new generation mRNA vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic (Fig. 1C).

Calculation methodology for the journal’s 2022 impact factor (upper panel) and 5-year impact factor (lower panel). (Source: Journal Citation Reports™ © Clarivate 2023)