An overview of lab finances

Some considerations when selecting a journal in which to publish your work:

Open access vs. “closed”. eLife is an example of an publishing platform that is open source, and adopts a number of author-friendly innovations.

General vs. specialty audience. Journals vary in the specificity of their topic area. In the old days, the most general scientific journals (Science, Nature, Current Biology) were the most prestigious. In recent years, the advent of broad, open-access, on-line only journals has changed this (PLoS One, Frontiers, Scientific Reports).

Where to find your audience. It is still the case that some journals are seen and considered by your particular target audience (e.g., the green journal).

Prestige. Sadly, this matters.

• Impact factor is a metric of how often articles in a journal are cited over the last 2-3 years. The calculation for 2020 would be: In calendar year 2020, the number of citations of articles published in 2018 and 2019, divided by the total number of papers during that time.
• It is a highly manipulated (and negotiated!) metric that varies substantially between fields of study
• Review journals tend to have elevated impact factors (e.g., Nature Reviews …)
• Although it is (in my opinion) a lousy metric, departmental and promotions committees prefer higher IF journals, and some have a threshold preference for IF > 6.
• IFs of relevant journals: NEJM 91, JAMA 56, Nature Medicine 53, Nature 50, Science 47, Lancet Neurology 44, Cell 42, Nature Neuroscience 25, Alzheimer’s & Dementia 22, Science Translational Medicine 18, Neuron 17, Nature Communications 15, Journal of Clinical Investigation 15, Brain 14, PNAS 11, PLoS Medicine 11, Current Biology 11, Annals of Neurology 10, Movement Disorders 10, Neurology (Green journal) 10, eLife 8, Neuroimage 7, Journal of Neuroscience 6, Scientific Reports 4, PLoS One 3, Frontiers (several options) 2-3.

Other considerations: reputation for the speed of the review process, tendency to post pre-prints quickly, reputation for promoting the work, quality of the journal website. On the last point: Scientific Reports is the Nature publishing group’s answer to PLoS One. In my opinion, it has moved ahead of PLoS One because the URL for the published paper begins “nature.com”