Introduction:

While assessing journals have long offered clinicians a valuable source of information and
guidelines for practice, the increasing volume of medical literature has increased their
importance. At the same time, awareness of the necessity for a systematic approach to
overviews of the medical literature has emerged [l-6]

Just as criteria for assessing the scientific quality of primary research have proved useful [7],
guidelines for assessing the scientific quality of journals are likely to aid interpretation by
editors and readers of medical journals.

High citation rates, impact factors, and circulation rates, and low manuscript acceptance rates
and indexing on Brandon/Hill Library List appear to be predictive of higher methodological
quality scores for journal articles. [8]
It is difficult for clinicians, scientists, and health policy analysts to keep up with the more
than 2 million new research articles published each year in medical and scientific journals.
Furthermore, many published reports are of poor-to-average methodological quality,
and most scientific articles are never cited. [9]
One approach to facilitating identification of sound medical evidence is to identify high-
quality journals that are likely to publish high-quality research. Peer-review and bibliometric
methods (such as journal citation rates, impact factors, circulation, manuscript acceptance
rates, and indexing on MEDLINE or Brandon/Hill Library List) may be useful in evaluating
the quality of a journal. However, these methods are controversial due to potential biases in
citation, impact factor, and inherent limitations of the sources of information used to calculate
them. Currently, none of these bibliometric parameters have been validated as predictors of
journal quality. [10]

We determined whether journal characteristics of peer-review status, citation rate,

Impact factor, circulation, and indexing on MEDLINE or the Brandon/Hill Library
List are associated with the methodological quality of original research articles they publish.
We therefore developed criteria for assessing the scientific quality of research journals [8],
and used them to prepare an overview quality assessment questionnaire. These criteria can,
however, be used with confidence only if they are reliable (i.e. different individuals come to
more or less the same conclusion when applying the criteria) and valid (they really do assess
the scientific quality of the journals) [11]
We have previously described the development of our criteria, and demonstrated that they can
be reliably applied by clinical epidemiologists, clinicians with some methodological training,
and by research assistants [12]. We then assessed the validity of the quality of journal. This
paper describes the results of this validation exercise..