One of the burdens of the information age is that there’s far more content produced than could ever be read by the population. This is categorically true of blogging, but also a fact of research publication. With hundreds of academic journals (ISI indexes over 11,000 science and social science journals) and thousands of articles published each year, there’s simply not time to read them all. There’s not even time to skim them all with an RSS aggregator.

The Wide Reach of Next-Gen Sequencing Studies

In the fields of next-gen sequencing and genomics, this problem is getting worse. Thanks to the democratization of sequencing, researchers in wide variety of biomedical fields have gained access to (and recognized the research utility) of next-gen sequencing technology. As a result, we’re seeing exome and genome sequencing studies published all over the place, not just in genetics/genomics journals but also many that focus on specific tissues (e.g. blood) or diseases (e.g. cancer, metabolic diseases, vision disorders, you name it). So, what, I have to read all of these journals now to keep up with NGS? Not gonna happen.

Journals and Impact Factor

Given this situation, it can be difficult to evaluate the success of an individual or organization based on the publication record
alone. And while we know that something in Science or Nature is a high-profile publication of significant achievement, it’s getting harder and harder to draw comparisons in our field because a large and diverse number of journals have embraced NGS as a research tool. My own CV lists publications in 21 different peer-reviewed journals — not counting book chapters and other one-offs — since 2005.

There *is* a metric for evaluating the significance of a publication based upon its journal, and that metric is called impact factor. Produced each year by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) for journals that have been around (indexed in Journal Citation Reports) for at least two years, the impact factor is a concise measurement of a journal’s value to the research community. High-profile journals that publish only significant research — such as The New England Journal of Medicine (53.30) and Nature (36.28) — have consistently high impact factors because, well, that’s where landmark research tends to be published.

Impact Factor Calculation and Inflation

Ranking journals by impact factor alone is useful but doesn’t tell the whole story. Notably, the impact factor calculation generally uses the date an article comes into print (as opposed to the date it came online), and a recent study in PLoS ONE found (by looking at 61 neuroscience journals) that the rising delays between online and print publication can artificially inflate impact factor.

The number of articles published per year can also influence impact factor; this may help explain why Nature Reviews Genetics (38.08) and Nature Reviews Cancer (37.55) have higher impact factors than Nature (36.28) itself. The Nature Reviews journals publish ~70 papers per year and they’re long, in-depth, extremely high quality review articles for the most part. Nature puts out ten times as many articles or more in a given year (841 in 2011).

Top Research Journals by Impact Factor

Using the latest available ISI data (2011), I’ve compiled a list of genetics and genomics journals ranked by impact factor. I did my best to select journals that:

• Publish research under ‘genetics’ or ‘genomics’ kewords (ISI keyword search)
• Have a scope that is either very broad (e.g. Nature) or emphasizing genetic/genomic research.
• Received a 2011 impact factor of at least 2.
• Did not imply a narrow scope to a certain disease, tissue, or specialty

In other words, while many fine journals are publishing genetics and genomics studies, I was looking for ones with a broad audience. This is not a bias by any means, but necessary triage to keep these listings to reasonable length. For simplicity, I’ve subdivided these journals into a few categories, and this subdivision is quite informal. In other words, I apologize in advance if you think a journal was omitted or put in the wrong category. As it says in my sidebar, my opinions are my own!

Top General or Medical Journals

Here are the top general/broad interest journals that regularly publish genetics/genomics studies enabled by next-gen sequencing. Many of these are super-competitive journals, the kind where a single publication is a career achievement for some fields.

Journal	ISSN	Impact Factor	5-Year Avg.	Articles	Influence
NEW ENGL J MED	0028-4793	53.30	50.08	349	21.30
LANCET	0140-6736	38.28	33.80	276	13.61
NATURE	0028-0836	36.28	36.24	841	20.37
CELL	0092-8674	32.40	34.77	338	20.55
SCIENCE	0036-8075	31.20	32.45	871	17.53
JAMA	0098-7484	30.03	29.68	220	13.11
NAT MED	1078-8956	22.46	26.42	187	12.16
PLOS MED	1549-1277	16.27	15.38	126	6.30
J CLIN INVEST	0021-9738	13.07	15.43	402	6.95
PNAS USA	0027-8424	9.68	10.47	3614	4.90
BMC MED	1741-7015	6.04	5.77	114	2.11
PLOS ONE	1932-6203	4.09	4.54	13781	1.80

The last entry above, PLoS ONE, is an interesting animal. I’ve had a chip in my shoulder about this journal because their review policy requires only that submissions be scientifically rigorous, not that the findings be significant. This just rubs me the wrong way; it makes me think “If this research isn’t significant, why am  I reading it?” And yet, there are lots of interesting papers (like the one about inflated impact factors that inspired this blog post) published in PLoS ONE. So I probably just need to get over myself.

Top Genetics and Genomics Journals

Next up, and probably most interesting to you readers, is the list of journals themed around genetics and genomics. Here, I required an impact score of at least 5, because there were far too many journals otherwise. I took out a couple of “Annual Reviews” journals that only publish once a year.

Journal	ISSN	Impact Factor	5-Year Avg.	Articles	Influence
NAT REV GENET	1471-0056	38.08	31.36	71	16.96
NAT GENET	1061-4036	35.53	33.10	196	17.58
GENOME RES	1088-9051	13.61	12.49	208	7.16
GENE DEV	0890-9369	11.66	12.79	236	8.02
PLOS BIOL	1545-7885	11.45	13.63	180	7.84
AM J HUM GENET	0002-9297	10.60	11.72	162	5.87
TRENDS GENET	0168-9525	10.06	8.99	60	4.48
GENOME BIOL	1474-7596	9.04	7.90	151	4.13
PLOS GENET	1553-7390	8.69	9.17	548	5.11
CUR OPIN GEN DEV	0959-437X	8.09	8.04	105	4.38
SCI TRANSL MED	1946-6234	7.80	7.81	216	4.11
HUM MOL GENET	0964-6906	7.64	7.51	463	3.16
MOL THER	1525-0016	6.87	6.28	230	2.02
MUTAT RES-REV	1383-5742	6.46	7.92	21	2.42
J MED GENET	0022-2593	6.37	5.67	131	2.28
BMC BIOL	1741-7007	5.75	5.84	48	2.78
HUM MUTAT	1059-7794	5.69	5.85	200	2.35
MOL BIOL EVOL	0737-4038	5.55	9.86	297	3.84
DNA RES	1340-2838	5.16	5.28	42	2.06
EVOLUTION	0014-3820	5.15	5.61	285	2.43
HUM GENET	0340-6717	5.07	4.18	137	1.61

My personal opinion is that Nature Genetics and Genome Research are the two top journals specific to our field, and the impact factor seems to support that. Several of my favorite journals (PLoS Biology, AJHG, Genome Biology, PLoS Genetics) are right in the 8 to 10 range. There are many, many options for publishing your genetic or genomic research, so you really have no excuse to be sitting on something!

Top Technology and Informatics Journals

I would be remiss not to include another category of journals with a focus on technology, methods, or bioinformatics. For us methods developers, these are great places to send manuscripts.

Journal	ISSN	Impact Factor	5-Year Avg.	Articles	Influence
NAT BIOTECHNOL	1087-0156	23.27	28.16	84	12.95
NAT METHODS	1548-7091	19.28	20.45	128	11.15
BIOINFORMATICS	1367-4803	5.47	6.05	707	2.61
PLOS COMPUT BIOL	1553-734X	5.22	5.84	407	2.72
BRIEF BIOINFORM	1467-5463	5.20	7.75	65	2.86
BMC BIOINFORMAT	1471-2105	2.75	3.49	557	1.32
BMC BIOTECHNOL	1472-6750	2.35	3.08	126	0.92

Of course, Nature Biotechnology and Nature Methods have the highest impact factor, but the journal Bioinformatics (a popular venue for many NGS analysis tools) is at a respectable 5.47.

Other Top Genetics and Genomics Journals

What are some other high-impact journals that broadly accept genetics/genomics/NGS manuscripts? Feel free to leave me a comment.

References

Tort, A., Targino, Z., & Amaral, O. (2012). Rising Publication Delays Inflate Journal Impact Factors PLoS ONE, 7 (12) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0053374