Biosciences: Evaluating Journal Quality in Other Areas

<p>I know I should know this now but.........
How do you guys evaluate journal qualitity in fields you are not familiar with. Do you guys use only impact factor, ranking of impact factors in that field, or something else?</p>

<p>Immunology:
Nature Immunology, Imp Fact 17, rank 4</p>

<p>Neuroscience:
Neuron, Imp Fact 14, rank 4</p>

<p>PNAS, imp fact ~20, rank NA</p>

<p>Do you compare them this way or some other way? I just want to evaluate the general quality of a journal.</p>

<p>It isn’t as cut and dry as a quantitative score would suggest. Certain journals can always be counted on for having high quality articles but good articles can appear in any journal. There are some journals that will take whatever crap comes from a specific lab and it shows. Unfortunately, I odn’t think there is a good way to know which journals are important in your field without getting a feel for the field and reading lots of articles.</p>

<p>I can say that in neuroscience (at least my corner of the world: developmental/repair), Neuron is considered better than PNAS.</p>

<p>I go by a combination of impact factor and what my PI wants to publish in. :)</p>

<p>If you are interested in the impact of a particular publication, try checking out ISI citation index for that particular publication or a particular author. You can also do similar type searches on Google Scholar.</p>

<p>thanks everyone for the responses!</p>

<p>Does anyone know how good of a journal Nature Immunology is? Some classmates and I are trying to evaluate a lab that mostly publishes in this journal, but none of us are that familar with this journal. Anyone know about this one specifically? We only really know the general molecular biology, biochem, and neuroscience journals.</p>

<p>Nature Immunology is a classic high impact journal. </p>

<p>However,If you are interested in a specific lab, it is more important to see how those publications are cited and by who (i.e. how they are received by the scientific community). You can use ISI or Google Scholar for this kind of search</p>

<p>Which lab that publishes in Nature Immunology are you trying to find out about? Nature Immunology is notorious for taking pretty much anything from a few different labs. I would check to see that they are publishing in other journals as well.</p>