Where will you send your next paper?

It is the researcher’s responsibility to share his or her findings with the scientific community. Ideally, researchers should aim to publish in a highly reputable journal and reach the most number of interested readers as possible.

Even if you are not publishing, how do you prioritize which journals to read each month?

In the early 1960s, Eugene Garfield approached this question by proposing the “journal’s impact factor” (JIF). I would encourage you to read this brief commentary by him (JAMA. 2006;295:90-93).

You can obtain the JIF by dividing the number or times the journal was cited during a certain period by the number of articles the journal published during the same time period.

Items such as correspondence, letters, commentaries and perspectives are not included in the analysis.

For instance, between 2002 and 2006, The New England Journal of Medicine was cited on 76,768 occasions. During that time, NEJM published 1,671 articles. So the five-year impact factor was 45.94. (Although less current, I like the five-year index better than the one-year index.)

I was ready to bet that NEJM had the highest JIF, but it follows the Annual Review of Immunology (JIF, 47.98) in the second place. Science (#10), Nature (#11), Nature Medicine (#13) and Cell (#14) are further down the list.

Regarding medical journals, the five-year JIF indicates that NEJM is followed by JAMA (25.79), Lancet (24.20) and the Annals of Internal Medicine (14.91).

Armed with curiosity, I queried the infectious diseases category in the ISI Web of Knowledge. Below I show you below the top 20 journals, sorted by their five-year JIF:

Top 20 Journals

Journal	Total Cites	Five-Year Impact Factor
1. Lancet Infect Dis	4,117	12.14
2. Clin Infect Dis	32,236	6.48
3. AIDS	19,479	5.78
4. Emerg Infect Dis	12,943	5.64
5. J Infect Dis	35,352	5.31
6. Curr Opin Infect Dis	1,770	4.42
7. Antivir Ther	2,532	4.55
8. Jaids-J Acq Imm Def	9,915	4.48
9. J Antimicrob Chemoth	12,445	3.75
10. Infect Immun	47,685	3.99
11. Aids Rev	498	3.71
12. HIV Med	1,030	3.35
13. Infect Cont Hosp Ep	6,077	3.41
14. J Viral Hepatitis	2,154	3.17
15. Pediatr Infect Dis J	8,571	3.07
16. Curr HIV Res	478	3.03
17. Sex Transm Infect	2,728	3.02
18. Sex Transm Dis	4,039	2.96
19. Clin Microbiol Infec	3,649	2.86
20. J Infection	2,714	2.21

The list is topped by the Lancet Infectious Diseases, a monthly journal published in the United Kingdom. The Journal of Infectious Diseases and Clinical Infectious Diseases, both published bimonthly by the University of Chicago Press, had approximately 35,000 citations during 2007, surpassed only by Infection and Immunity, which is published by the American Society for Microbiology. Clinical Infectious Diseases had 7% of self-cites, whereas the Journal of Infectious Diseases had 5%. The Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal has a strong JIF, considering the high volume of articles it publishes.

There are alternative indexes, such as the Eigenfactor Score, which is similar to the JIF but does not consider self-citations, among other things, and there is also controversy about how relevant or biased the JIF is, but I won’t delve into that here.

Next time, do a little extra research before submitting your manuscript. I hope this brief note illustrated how to explore this conundrum. Good luck and aim well and high!

“A manuscript not submitted won’t get published.”
– Anonymous

“To publish papers is one of the most important responsibilities of a scientist.”
– Tsang & Oh. Building an Academic Career, 1993