eCM Supplements of Conference Meeting Abstracts

In June 2017, eCM journal (Eur Cell Mater) council decided to discontinue and remove all old supplements published in eCM journal. This decision was based upon the unfortunate situation that, randomly, since 2013, eCM conference abstract supplements were being used in the JCR/Clarivate Analytics calculation of eCM journal's Impact Factor.

eCM supplements were pure conference abstracts, which should have not been included in an Impact Factor calculation ("non-citable item"). eCM and many other journals do not even allow manuscripts to cite conference abstracts. Indeed, from the 17 supplements published in 2014 and 2015, and used for the calculation of the 2016 JCR Impact Factor, there were zero citations. eCM supplements did not have a DOI, are/were not searchable on PubMed, are/were not deposited in CLOCKSS and are/were not allowed to be cited by eCM, as they are not peer reviewed. Despite this, JCR/Clarivate Analytics have used these non-citable supplements in the calculation of 2016 Impact Factor. This has wrongly caused a drop of eCM's 2016 Impact Factor from 4.633 to 4.000.

Therefore, eCM Journal council decided to stop the production and hosting of eCM supplements within eCM journal. All old supplements were modified, with the removal of any reference to eCM journal, eCM journal's ISSN number and references list. In addition, they were combined into 1 PDF for oral presentations and 1 for poster presentations. These Meeting Abstract collections are now published by eCM conferences Open Access online periodical and are hosted on ecmconferences website, which is not part of the eCM (Eur Cell Mater) journal.

eCM conferences Open Access online periodical publishes collections of combined individual meeting abstracts from various congresses. eCM conferences Open Access online periodical has been recorded permanently in the ISSN Register (ISSN: 2522-235X from the ISSN International Centre), does not have a DOI and the abstracts are not searchable on PubMed. The abstract collections can be cited, if desired and allowed by the publisher (e.g. Hartmanne, C. Wnt signaling in bone development and regeneration, eCM Meeting Abstracts 2016, Collection 4; eCM XVII, page 1). Please note that eCM conferences abstract collections are not allowed to be cited by eCM journal manuscripts.

Costs associated with hosting of these abstracts have also dropped dramatically, due to the less labour intensive production of these single PDF collections. If you are interested to host your conference abstracts with us, please read the eCM Conferences Meeting Abstracts Information.

R. Geoff Richards, Editor-in-Chief eCM Journal

Martin Stoddart, Conference Chair and co-ordinator, eCM Conferences