<p>Is it me or is it that the journals with the highest impact factors have are in the field of medecine, followed by science, such as Nature?</p>
<p>Where does that leave engineering graduate students who want to publish in a high impact factor journal? Is it even a goal for a student looking for publications in high impact factor journals or is it a waste of time aiming for that if you are an engineering graduate student.</p>
<p>I've read that youre good to go as long as your'e abv 4.Is it then a futile exercise for me professionally to get published in a journal with an impact factor of 1.4?</p>
<p>Getting published in Science, Nature, or Cell is something that most established professors don’t even accomplish, much less graduate and undergraduate students. So leave that out of your mind, unless you discover something truly groundbreaking in your field. (For the record, Science takes anything in the STEM fields - they even taken psychology and sociology papers occasionally.) Those journals are high-impact because they are widely read in all of the sciences and they only publish groundbreaking work, so everyone who builds upon that seminal piece is going to cite the Science (or Nature or Cell) paper.</p>
<p>What you need are journals that are high impact in your field. For example, in my field an impact factor of 3 is good and 2 is decent. Besides, impact factor is not the end all-be all - one of the most respected journals in my broad field has a lower impact factor than one in my niche field, but the one in the broad field is definitely more widely read and would look better on my CV. Some journals are just more prone to publishing citable papers. Some well-respected journals have a lot of front-matter and letters to the editor.</p>
<p>I don’t think it’s ever futile to get published. If you get published in any journal, you are more likely to get published in other journals. You have to start somewhere and work your way up.</p>
<p>To build on the above, every field has “A” journals, “B” journals, and “C” journals (and these are usually designated based on impact factors). Your goal is to publish in your field’s “A” journals. Any faculty member can tell you which journals are A journals. It’s usually pretty codified for the purpose of tenure (a department names the A journals and B journals explicitly and only publications in the A and B journals are considered for tenure review).</p>