BioMed Central Blog

BMC-series journals on track for Impact Factor

BMC Biophysics, BMC Ecology and BMC Endocrine Disorders have all recently been accepted for indexing by Thomson Reuters and are on course to receive their first Impact Factors. We are delighted that these journals have been selected for indexing, joining the many other journals in the BMC series  to have an Impact Factor.

BMC Endocrine Disorders has been tracked from publications in 2009 and is due to receive its first Impact Factor in 2012. A recent blog post discusses one of the special thematic collections in BMC Ecology, which has likely contributed to the increased visibility and recognition of the journal.

This is great news too for BMC Biophysics, considering it is less than a year since the journal re-launched on the BioMed Central platform. Since re-launch the journal has recruited a new Editorial Board consisting of world-renowned experts in the field.

In 2011 we published many interesting articles, including one from our Section Editor, Gerhard Gompper, which is an important theoretical contribution to the field. In it, the authors introduce and analyze a discrete filament-motor protein model of subcellular microtubule self-assembly in fission yeast, which demonstrates spontaneous generation of a number of steady states, including spindles, nematics, and asters. We think this study highlights the power and flexibility of online open access publishing in biophysics, as the authors were able to directly link the article’s text to their video figures. View their hypnotic animations of microtubule vortices here.

The journal has already had a strong start to 2012 by publishing an exciting article by Qin et al. describing the structural determination of the EphA4 ligand binding domain, providing the first experimental and computational evidence that intrinsic dynamics are most likely to be responsible for the observed high conformational diversity that mediates binding affinity and specificity. An accompanying commentary by Ruth Nussinov and Buyong Ma in our flagship biology journal BMC Biology says: “These snapshots of multiple conformations of the free EphA4 LDB provide a unique insight into the conformational dynamics of EphA4 and the Eph-ephrin signaling pathways.”

After such a great start we are looking forward to what 2012 has in store for these journals and would invite you to submit your next research article to BMC Biophysics, BMC Ecology and BMC Endocrine Disorders.

Shane Canning

Journal Development Editor

Simon Harold

Executive Editor

Posted by Shane Canning at 12:36    Comments (0)