The Congress Impact Factor: A proposal from board members of the World Society of Emergency Surgeons.it (WSES) and Academy of Emergency Medicine and Care (AcEMC)

Many scientific congresses and conferences are held every year around the world. The aim of the World Society of Emergency Surgeons.it (WSES) and Academy of Emergency Medicine and Care (AcEMC) was to develop a simple mathematical parameter as an indicator of academic quality and scientific validity of a congress. In this opinion article, a new metric, the Congress Impact Factor (IFc), is proposed taking into consideration the widely used Impact Factor as an indicator of journals' prestige and using H-index analysis. The IFc is derived from the mathematical ratio between the mean H-index of invited lecturers normalized for lecture topic and number of lectures in the conference. In case of multiple sessions, the mean of all IFc is calculated along with its standard deviation.  We conclude that the IFc can be a useful measure for evaluating and comparing congress prestige, and may also represent a potentially useful parameter for improving academic curriculum and helping participants to choose the more prestigious meetings for their education.