<p>Well the good news is that our publication is going to be published and I will officially have a first authorship that I can put on my graduate school applications. My question is, how do I tell if this is a good journal or not? I am an undergraduate still so I do not know all of the top journals in my field. </p>
<p>Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behavior</p>
<p>Ask your advisor, or whichever prof you are assisting in research right now.</p>
<p>Type in the journal name and then ‘impact factor’, which is what is generally used to rank journals. The one you listed came up at a 2.677. For reference, Journal of Neuroscience is an 8 and Neuron is 17 (the higher the more prestigious). </p>
<p>However, your advisor is the best bet because each subfield has its own journals that can be ranked fairly low IF wise but still be considered very good within the field. My last rotation involved doing work in a fairly small field so the journals were ranked pretty low, but there were definitely more prestigious journals within the rankings.</p>
<p>Also, it will look good that you are published first regardless of the rankings.</p>
<p>Oh it has an impact factor of 2.956 for 2009. Is that good, bad, or average? I will definitely ask my professor as well.</p>
<p>@MaceVindaloo </p>
<p>Oh I see, thank you.</p>
<p>2.9 is a low impact factor but the world of academia has changed since impact factors were a big deal. With the advent of pubmed, most articles are available to everyone. When you publish in an insect journal, it doesn’t even go into pubmed. Take that Pan American Entymologist Journal (there is a faculty member in my department who published here). [Do</a> Impact Factors change with a change of medium? A comparison of Impact Factors when publication is by paper and through parallel publishing ? Journal of Information Science](<a href=“http://jis.sagepub.com/content/29/6/527.abstract]Do”>http://jis.sagepub.com/content/29/6/527.abstract) Congrats on your publication</p>