Molecular Therapy Reaches Highest-Ever Impact Factor of 12.9

I’m proud to announce that the impact factor of our flagship journal Molecular Therapy increased to 12.9 in 2021–the highest value in its history.

The increase represented a 12.6 percent jump for Molecular Therapy from 2020 to 2021. Molecular Therapy-Nucleic Acids (MTNA) for the first time reached an impact factor of more than 10 at 10.2, representing an increase of 15 percent. Molecular Therapy-Oncolytics (MTO) and Molecular Therapy-Methods & Clinical Development (MTMCD) also achieved healthy impact factors of 6.3 and 5.8, respectively. Impact factors, which measure the frequency with which an average article has been cited in a journal, rank research titles against one another to determine leading journals around the world.

While the quality of a journal cannot entirely be judged by its impact factor, these numbers reflect the leading role of our journal family in the field of gene and related molecular and cellular therapies and their embrace by the biomedical research community. The success of our journals is in part rooted in the close editorial collaboration and shared special issues between all four journals, with Molecular Therapy focusing on those articles of the most general interest. Publications on mRNA vaccine development, clinical gene therapy, and the role of cellular RNA in disease mechanism and identification of therapeutic targets were particularly influential this past year.

We are thankful to the authors who submitted their outstanding work to us and to the editors and reviewers for their tireless work that is so critical to our success.

Dr. Herzog is a professor of pediatrics, Riley Children's Foundation Professor of Immunology, and director of the gene and cell therapy program at Indiana University, and the editor-in-chief of Molecular Therapy.