With the December issue of Volume 291 of the Journal of Experimental Zoology (JEZ), the section of Molecular and Developmental Evolution (MDE) has been published for three years, having completed its third volume (JEZ volumes 285, 288, and 291). For the ''parent'' journal, MDE is an experiment of radical innovation, allowing a part of the journal complete editorial independence to explore a new direction of biological researchF the evolutionary study of development combined with the mechanistic study of evolutionary change. It is thus appropriate to ask how well this experiment is working, i.e., how well the new section is serving the nascent community of Devo Evo researchers. The natural way to answer this question is to see how influential the papers are that have been published to date in MDE. A number of bibliometric methods have been developed to measure the influence of a journal, among them the so-called impact factor. In the case of MDE, however, the impact factor cannot be readily determined because MDE is not indexed independently from JEZ. The impact factor of JEZ, however, does not accurately reflect the performance of MDE, because it publishes many more papers per year than MDE. We thus have to resort to methods that we can research ourselves, but that we believe nevertheless reflect how widely read the papers in MDE are.
The following analysis is based on an article per article count of citations as reflected in the record of the article in the Web of Science website (http:// www.webofscience.com). The count was tallied in mid-December by my assistant, Paulette Sauska, by calling up each individual article on the website and recording the number of citations reported by that day. The date of the count in December leads to a slight undercounting of some of the publications that will still appear later in the current year. The census date is dictated by the fact that, each year, the editorial board of MDE meets at the annual conference of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology during the first week of January. Citation counts obtained in this way are cumulative, i.e., they reflect all the citations the paper received up to that date. We thus call the average number of citations the cumulative impact of a volume (CI). It is nonetheless difficult