Objective: The authors created a new citation index of the Journal of the Korean Rheumatism Association (JKRA) and, based on the index, developed internal impact score, which can measure contribution to the development of the journal by manuscript, by author and by institute. Thus, we report the results in this paper. Methods: For manuscripts published in the JKRA from Volume 1 No. 1 in 1994 to Volume 13 No. 4 in 2006, we built a database of the journals and their references, and created an index using the database. The citation index were analyzed using three indicators internal impact score for manuscript (IIS-M), internal impact score for author (IIS-A) and internal impact score for institute (IIS-I). Results: The total number of references cited in the manuscripts was 7,341, and of the references, 80 (1.1%) had been published in the JKRA. The mean IIS-M of all the cited manuscripts was 0.46. The total number of authors participated in the cited manuscripts was 226. In IIS-A calculated in consideration of each author's participation and the weight of manuscripts, the highest score was 19.253. The number of institutes that had produced the cited manuscripts was 29. In IIS-I calculated in consideration of each organization's participation and the weight of manuscripts, the highest score was 92. Conclusion: If the indicators developed by the authors are used as tools for analyzing the citation indexes of journals, they can quantify the contribution of manuscripts, authors and institutes to each journal, and compensation based on the quantified contribution will promote the development of academic journals considerably.

Keywords: Rheumatology, Citation, Impact factor