Pay no attention to the Impact Factor behind the curtain...
January 12, 2010 12:49 PM Subscribe
Calling all biological scientists on MeFi. Please tell me about the journals you publish in. In what journals have you published recently? How was your experience?
I know your choices will vary widely with the topic of the manuscript, I just want to hear about the journals you like (or not).
I'm also interested in hearing whether you, as a reviewer of professorial job candidates, would consider certain items in a publishing record to be undesirable. (i.e., Multiple papers in same journal, publications in such-and-such journal with bad reputation, etc.) All my impact factors right now are middling.
Thanks.
I know your choices will vary widely with the topic of the manuscript, I just want to hear about the journals you like (or not).
I'm also interested in hearing whether you, as a reviewer of professorial job candidates, would consider certain items in a publishing record to be undesirable. (i.e., Multiple papers in same journal, publications in such-and-such journal with bad reputation, etc.) All my impact factors right now are middling.
Thanks.
Candidates with a dozen or more papers in low impact journals look worse than others with fewer papers in high impact journals. Multiple papers in the same journal makes no difference, especially if the journal is considered one of the better ones.
Even this is very subjective. Impact factors only make a difference for job seekers at R1 universities. For more applied/agency/extension type jobs, papers in low impact journals don't matter so much.
How was your experience?
Varies widely. Even within the same journal.
posted by special-k at 1:47 PM on January 12, 2010
Even this is very subjective. Impact factors only make a difference for job seekers at R1 universities. For more applied/agency/extension type jobs, papers in low impact journals don't matter so much.
How was your experience?
Varies widely. Even within the same journal.
posted by special-k at 1:47 PM on January 12, 2010
I too am writing from a post-doc point of view.
I tried to make an effort to publish in more general journals that got a wider audience. So, for example, shooting for J. Neuroscience rather than J. Neuroendocrinology (to pick journals that aren't Science or Cell or whatever - of course, the impact factor of the first is better which also makes a difference)
posted by gaspode at 1:49 PM on January 12, 2010
I tried to make an effort to publish in more general journals that got a wider audience. So, for example, shooting for J. Neuroscience rather than J. Neuroendocrinology (to pick journals that aren't Science or Cell or whatever - of course, the impact factor of the first is better which also makes a difference)
posted by gaspode at 1:49 PM on January 12, 2010
Response by poster: These are great answers! Since this is kind of a specialized question, I will continue to check back for as long as the thread is open. Don't let the time that goes by keep you from posting!
posted by Knowyournuts at 4:51 PM on January 12, 2010
posted by Knowyournuts at 4:51 PM on January 12, 2010
I think that "bad" journals tend to reflect results which are uninteresting more than incorrect and don't hold that against them. If you were a PI applying for a tenured position, I'd take failure to generate important results as a bad sign. That you have lots of little projects which ended up in j-of-nobody-cares might show a lack of discipline or bad luck, but that's better than nothing. The value to you is non-linear, but it's also not necessarily a good strategy to try for the big shot unless you see a very clear path.
posted by a robot made out of meat at 7:09 PM on January 12, 2010
posted by a robot made out of meat at 7:09 PM on January 12, 2010
This thread is closed to new comments.
Biochemistry - Generally I have had a good experience with all American Chem. Soc. journals in terms of being prompt with reviews, selecting good reviewers, and being fair when it comes to making a decision on publication. This is a more technical journal, but generally regarded as "good" when you have a lengthy, technical paper. Most of the stuff I read here is very good quality. Impact factor is 3.4
J. Mol. Biol. - Reviewers are a little more nit-picky, and we had to submit a structure of the protein we were studying to the PDB even though we had some intermediate/not totally conclusive data. Impact factor is 4.5
Biophysical Journal - We have not sent papers to this journal lately, you have to be a Biophysical Society member (I think) and the fees for color figures, etc. are quite high. Impact factor is comparable to J. Mol. Biol. (4.6) but in my group at least it is regarded as being more biased towards specific groups. In my opinion (based mostly on my field) the papers coming out of BpJ are a little more high-impact than the more technical papers published in Biochemistry.
Nature - We had some major results this summer in my lab and decided to take a stab at one of the big journals, and amazingly made it in. The review process was totally different from any other journals - they got all the reviews back, let us respond to the criticisms of one reviewer, made their tentative decision and then we got the rest of the reviews back (the other two were not so critical). Then they made their final decision after we edited everything down for length and added in some of the content from the review rebuttal. Big space constraints with big journals like this, not the place for a technical paper and I was almost sad to see some of the technical nuances of our paper get pushed to the side because of space. They also have a very heavy hand with editing, and even require that you send then editable figures (.ai files, etc) so they can directly make changes. And they will also change everything to British-English. Overall I would say it was a very different experience from any other journal, although the editors were very responsive to my PI in terms of "when will you get back to us" questions.
posted by sararah at 1:23 PM on January 12, 2010