The increasing trend of using impact factors published by Thomson Scientific as an indicator in academic evaluation in universities and research institutes has received much criticism from non-English-speakers of the developing world [50] . One of the criticisms against it is the alleged language bias of the Thomson Scientific database coverage towards journals published in English and in the industrialised world [51, 52] . The 'what-if' scenarios of inclusion of non-Science Citation Index (SCI)-indexed journals upon the impact factors of SCIindexed journals have been studied and the 'hypothetical' impact factors of the non-SCI-indexed journals calculated [52, 53] . In order to better evaluate the performances of Latin American journals, SciELO publishes bibliometric indices of its own, similar to that of Thomson Scientific, using data from its database which reflect more the regional context [53] . Brazilians can now evaluate their journals using the SciELO impact factor, rather than relying solely on that published in JCR [54] . Should the Chinese do the same? At the moment VIP Information publishes bibliometric indices using data from its own database [40] (cf. Table 4 ). These data should be used in our evaluation of the quality of Chinese journals, especially in our fields of epidemiology and public health, as hardly any of these are indexed in Thomson Scientific database. Currently only a sub-set of Chinese journals receive their impact factors from VIP Information. Hopefully, in the future, more journals will receive their bibliometric data, perhaps not only from VIP Information alone, but pooling data from the other Chinese databases as well. In the long run, I envision an international collaboration between Thomson Scientific, SciELO, the Chinese databases and other bibliographic databases to provide authors and editors alike with a more accurate and comprehensive bibliometric data of journal performance by collating data across the various databases.