Editorial. Mental health nursing needs to lift its game in the citation stakes

The journal impact factor (JIF) and rating the performance of an academic using the h-index are currently hot topics in nursing. In the April editorial, it was noted that the International Journal of Mental Health Nursing achieved an ISI listing in 2009, meaning it will receive its first official impact factor in a year or two (Happell 2010). We recently reviewed JIF and the h-index for the top 12 nursing journals (Hunt & Cleary 2010) and would now like to focus attention on the subspecialty of mental health nursing. For the uninitiated, the Hirsch (2005) h-index is used to assess research output, and can be calculated for a person, research group, or journal using databases, such as Web of Science (WoS), Scopus, and Google Scholar (Bakkalbasi et al. 2006). The h-index combines quantity (number of publications) and impact (number of citations) and is relatively easy to calculate (for recent review see Hunt et al. 2010). Thus, a h-index of 15 means a researcher has at least 15 papers that have each been cited at least 15 times.