<p>As in, a ranked list of journal prestige? (it obviously won’t be perfect, but it’ll still be very informative).</p>
<p>Anecdotal evidence establishes that Nature and Science are the most prestigious among science journals, and that the American Sociological Review is the most prestigious sociology journal. But how do people know this? Surely, there must be statistics used in this process.</p>
<p>I am especially curious about medical journals (seeing that many studies are funded by drug companies, and I want to see which studies are actually reliable and which ones are not).</p>
<p>But they are not particularly comprehensive. There are still many more journals that I’d like to account for. Besides, which journals can be determined as reliable and which as effectively useless?</p>
<p>As far as medical journals go, JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) and it’s associated journals (basically broken down by specialty area - ie Archives of Internal Medicine) are good. The New England Journal of Medicine is also read by pretty much everyone, but does need to be taken with a grain of salt as they consider themselves more of a news magazine than journal (if that distinction makes sense), but still good stuff. Lancet - from the UK - is good too.</p>
<p>As far as drug companies funding studies - that shouldn’t affect your initial judgment of a study. It needs to be taken into account, but if the study design is good, the analysis appropriate, and points salient, then it’s a good study whoever funded it.</p>
<p>What I’m saying is that you have to judge the study in and of itself. There are plenty of ****ty studies that have shown up in JAMA or the NEJM. </p>
<p>Obviously peer-reviewed studies are more reliable than other types, and randomized prospective studies are more reliable than retrospective case control studies. And obviously if a study has no control or placebo group, it’s not very good. But again, these are characteristics of individual studies, not the journals they are presented in. </p>
<p>The other thing is that a journal may not be well known to the general public, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t at the forefront of breaking information in that field. And most journals are pretty specific for one area of academia. A pulmonologist isn’t likely to read Spine although that’s one of the most important journals in orthopedics. Likewise as sociologist who specializes in juvenile delinquency isn’t very likely to be reading a journal that specializes in environmental sociology.</p>
<p>For math and applied math, the most prestigious are the Annals of Mathematics (somewhat obviously), and Elsevier’s Physica D (from the title, you’d think that it would be physics, but it’s really math + applied math).</p>
<p>well i usually just search it (because there’s the search engine thing) with some keywords and use my own judgement for each of the papers. I know that stink things happen in science so sometimes ppl have to rush their stuff through big name papers, and plus the space on big name papers are can be quite expensive (or not but I hate the way nature+science papers are so nastily concise). and i love pubmed.</p>
<p>there’s a established factor that people use to determine the significance of a science journal, aka the impact factor. There’s a ranking of many major academic journals according to impact factors on wikipedia. </p>