Top ten journals
Jetaime Rouse
Monday, 25 May 2009 20:21 UTC
What are considered the top ten journals? Or top five?
Because it takes a “good paper” to make it to publication in a “good journal” I thought this made for a good question/discussion. I did have an idea that the concept of a “good journal” was relative, so thanks for making that clear. With that in my mind I was really just looking for personal opinions on what are considered the top journals amongst the group members. Thanks guys :)
Updated 02 June 2009 12:31 UTC
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Replies
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Jette,
can you explain your question a little further? And bear in mind that this forum is about good science writing.
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This appears to be a question of zero interest to scientists, though possibly of interest to status-conscious journal editors.
You could ask what are the top tem papers, or the top ten authors (though you wouldn’t be able to produce a useful answer even to that).
All the journal does is print the stuff. Even to ask the question is a sign of the corruption of science that has occurred as a result of things like impact factors.
I have, sadly, to admit that this corruption could not have occurred without the collusion of some scientists (mostly the sort who gave up experiments and donned black suits)
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This as Martin and David said is a difficult question to answer. There has been many attempts on other ranking than impact factor to classify journals. But, this all boils down to the actual science being published in the journals. This was blogged about recently on the New York page here
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I completely subscribe to Martin’s point. Do frame your questions precisely to garner better information.
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Top ten journals:
If you look at the impact factor:
1. CA-CANCER J CLIN
2. NEW ENGL J MED
3. ANNU REV IMMUNOL
4. REV MOD PHYS
5. NAT REV MOL CELL BIO
6. ANNU REV BIOCHEM
7. CELL
8. PHYSIOL REV
9. NAT REV CANCER
10. NATUREHowever, let’s exchange the impact factor for the SJR ranking (SCImago journal rank).
1. Annual Review of Immunology
2. Cell
3. Annual Review of Biochemistry
4. Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology
5. Nature Immunology
6. Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology
7. Nature Genetics
8. Ca-A Cancer Journal for Clinicians
9. Immunity
10. Annual Review of GeneticsSJR is quite nice because it considers the ‘weight’ of the citations and it is open access (nice reference: FASEB vol 22 pp 2623).
As you can see the list is not quite the same. This is also valid if you go down the list. Nature scores better in IF (rank 10), but not so good with SJR (rank 23). PNAS is good with IF, but not with SJR.
I had a period in my life where I asked everybody in which journal they would like to have a publication. The most common answer (appr. 90%) is ‘Cell’. That’s because it has a high impact factor (or SJR) and you can tell a full story there.
Personally I would like to have a publication in Nature one day because it is good publicity and well respected. And of course a Cell publication is just too much work. ;)
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I agree with others who have suggested that this discussion is best continued elsewhere, eg the Citation in Science forum, rather than in this (Good Paper) forum, as it isn’t relevant here.
Mark’s lists shows at least two immediate problems with using IF to “rank” journals – the skew is for Reviews and for journals that don’t publish many articles.
But – let’s go elsewhere if anyone wants to continue this discussion. (There is already plenty at the Citation in Science forum about the flawed ways in which impact factors are commonly used).
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I think ranking journals is always relative, it depends very much on the criteria you are using.
Nevertheless take a look at
DBIO: Top 100 Journals in Biology and Medicine
They will be announcing the top 10 most “influential” journals soon.
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