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publications...does the journal matter?


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ok, well there are really two ways of looking at this:

 

1) For the sake of getting into med school, ANY publication in a peer reviewed journal is probably good enough...clearly though, having a first author paper in a kick ass journal like nature or science will have adcoms paying more attention to you, but for the most part I personally believe that if you published an article in a journal with a low-ish impact factor, it will still get you across some arbitrary line. Don't forget that many grad students don't even have that one publication.

 

2) if your career is in research, then by all means, aim for the stars, because that actually DOES matter (beyond being a major ego boost)

 

that is all.

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as a masters/phd student (maybe less so for phd depending on the lab), you are only really responsible/can take credit for the quality of your data and not really the science behind it. Alot of times if you look at the high impact factor journals, there are actually very few experiments (the exception is cell which publishes huge 10 figure monsters). Having a top paper really is a reflection of how good your PI is and not really of how smart you are. Once you get to the stage where you are directing the course of your own projects (PI and post-doc), impact factor becomes extremely important as its a very common (good or bad) criteria in faculty recruitment and promotion.

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