Looking ahead for 2009, I’ve already established that publication will be one of my highest priorities. To motivate myself, I updated my list of top journals for genomics, ranked them by their most recent impact factor (2007), then printed it out and taped it on a cabinet right in front of me.
When I was taping it on top of my older (2004?) list, I happened to notice some interesting changes in impact factor over the past few years. First, I saw that Nature has finally surpassed Science by impact factor (28.75 compared to 26.37). I used to get Science in print and like its format, but ironically, the big publications on my CV are all in Nature. AAAS had better watch out, because Nature Genetics, which I consider the top journal for our field, has moved to within striking distance (24.18 to 25.56).
Next, I was pleased to see open access journals moving up in the ranks, particularly PLoS Genetics (from 7.67 to 8.72) and BMC Genomics (4.03 to 4.18). I noted that the American Journal of Human Genetics (11.09) is still thrashing the European Journal of Human Genetics (4.00). I was disappointed at a slight drop for Human Mutation (6.47 to 6.27), since they published my inaugural first-author paper (don’t worry HuMu, I still love ya!).
Consistently moving up were Pharmacogenetics and Genomics (5.39 to 5.78) and Pharmacogenomics Journal (3.96 to 4.97), a reflection, perhaps, of the growing interest in personalized medicine.
Just for fun, I took the publications from my own CV and looked at the impact factors of journals where they were published (Nature, PLoS Biology, Human Mutation, J. of Infectious Diseases, and Genomics). It seems my average career impact factor is 19.24. Not too shabby!