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What Is A 'respectable' Impact Factor?


Economist

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I searched online for the answer but only saw similar postings on basic science/masters/phd forums where their standards seemed a lot higher than med student/residents. Obviously publishing in any journal would be better than not publishing but in the worlds of med student/residents what is considered a 'respectable' impact factor?  I realize impact factor alone doesnt mean everything but the journals that my PI and I are considering seem to have very low impact factors. I'm not sure if I should suggest to hold it off and put in more work/time to possibly try for a higher journal.

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JBC is ~5, so I'll go with 5 as "respectable". But then again, once you go below 10, it's the content that matters.

What does that even mean.... If you go above 10, the content of the research does not matter? JBC is not as high impact any more, but I would say a 7+ impact factor is decent...

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What does that even mean.... If you go above 10, the content of the research does not matter? JBC is not as high impact any more, but I would say a 7+ impact factor is decent...

...it means a 10+ IF can give your CV a boost just by the IF alone. I never said content doesn't matter for a IF>10 paper.

 

Also, JBC might not have a high IF, but it's still a very respectable and rigorous journal. Its IF is mainly hampered by its large number of biochem papers which are cited less frequently than papers from other field. That's why I used JBC as an example of "decent journal" in my previous post.

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Yeah, I second what chocolatecheese said. IF varies by field. In the Vision Sciences, the top 5 journals have IF 3.5 to 8.5. It's all relative. Also, have a look at the journals your supervisor and top individuals in the field (heavily cited, basically household names, etc.) have published in. If you publish in one of those journals, you're fine.

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  • 5 months later...

Actually, you said publishing is still always better but it's not necessarily true. As a rule of thumb, you don't want to public in a journal with impact factor lower than 2. Anything IS respectable it just depends on what you publish. 

2 to 5 = Might have repeated research that are not "NOVEL" but applied it to a new model for example. This is still valuable research.

5-10 = Probably a bit more novel.

10-18 = Probably a broader audience, quite novel research, lots of good data.

Then it jumps to like

 

30+ = Nature, Science and such. Incredible outstanding research. If you can get a paper in Nature or science as a first or even second author, you are somewhat guaranteed entry in any laboratory you would wanna do a PhD. That is quite unlikely to have a nature or science though. It's long to obtain results in biology and to even obtain a regular paper is already very good during an internship or such.

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  • 2 weeks later...

As a med student, any publication is impressive.

 

As a resident, unless you are really gunning for some top tier pure research fellowship, any publication is fine. Obviously better known journals help, but most residents aren't publishing in impressive journals, if they are publishing at all.

 

Except for one journal in my specialty, all journals (including the premier North American journal) have an IF <5.

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As a med student, any publication is impressive.

 

As a resident, unless you are really gunning for some top tier pure research fellowship, any publication is fine. Obviously better known journals help, but most residents aren't publishing in impressive journals, if they are publishing at all.

 

Except for one journal in my specialty, all journals (including the premier North American journal) have an IF <5.

 

does it matter (for CaRMs or anything else career related) if the publication was from work before med school or does research only matter if it's clinical research undertaken as a med student?

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The long and short - It's field dependent.

 

Use the IF to get a sense of a journal relative to others in a field. Also, be mindful that IF is not perfect, or the end all be all. Learn how one deduces an IF and the potential limitations. Lastly, try to appreciate some alternatives to this system.

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does it matter (for CaRMs or anything else career related) if the publication was from work before med school or does research only matter if it's clinical research undertaken as a med student?

For us, we don't really care unless it's clinical research that's relevant to our specialty. Even then, we don't really care very much. It's not gonna move you up or down the rank order list that's for sure. Maybe if you first authored a landmark paper in our specialty it might be different, but you won't do that as a pre-med, med student, resident or fellow.

 

We've never had someone appply who published the cover article in Nature or NEJM, so maybe if you landed a pre-med school Nature cover we might be a bit interested. But definitely not more than elective performance.

 

For career stuff, I don't know enough to give an opinion. I imagine it matters in academic practice and not near as much (if at all) in community practice.

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