Dear Dr Aziz,

As a response to your letter 'Lets be honest', the amount of 'web hits' guidelines receive isn't usually translated into the amount of citations they may receive. The guidelines that the BTS produced that feature so prominently on the Thorax 'Top ten most read articles' have relatively low citations (ISI Web of Knowledge) - all the BTS Guidelines published in 2003 only received a total of 16 cites between them. To put that into context the total number of cited Thorax papers in 2002 and 2003 was 2041. The bulk of the cites that give Thorax a high impact factor are therefore from 'true' submissions.

I hope this clarifies the situation slightly. If you require further details please see the ISI website.

Best regards,

Edward Howard
Development Editor
Thorax

Dear Editor,

Although I was pleased to see the rise in impact factor of Thorax but I just looked at the list of 10 most 'read' articles in thorax.

I was surprised to see all of them were part of guidelines published by the BTS and none were 'true' submissions to the journal.

Although impact factors do not rely on 'web hits' but this does imply that the rise in Thorax's impact factor has more to do with BTS producing more guidelines than from 'quality of publications/submissions'.

It would be interesting to know what would be the impact factor of various journals (including Thorax) if guidelines/consensus statements etc are taken out. I would like the editorial team to try and give us a 'truer picture'.