Deciding on "good quality" journals - intercalating MSc dissertation

So, I'm working over summer to complete my dissertation before deadline and going back to 4th year med. I've been growing frustrated at my supervisors who are giving little guidance and staunchly critical of what I've elaborated on, sometimes feeling like we're talking two different languages.

One of the comments I got was to choose my journals carefully, I have a Refworks tank of about 300 papers I can use, and naturally after that I went through to skim out the translated papers and some of the more unusual journals, but I tried to focus on meta-analysis, assuming they were the most reliable, all-round accurate type.

Then I was told to even be careful of those, and to focus on Nature......Nature?

So here I am, looking at the Journal of Clinical Investigation, of Clinical Oncology, of Pathology, International Journal of Breast Cancer research and yet despite not being allowed to actually critique my studies, I'm kinda just supposed to know which ones are good.

So, what types of journals/articles are reliable?

Journals operate on a hierarchy - the more reputable the journal, the more likely it is to get genuinely important and significant research papers submitted to it. Impact factor is a shorthand metric to judge the quality/importance of a journal, but part of becoming a researcher is learning about which journals are top-level (Nature, NEJM, The Lancet, Cell, BMJ, JAMA) and which are bottom level - for the time being, you'll need to use Google. Using the examples you give:

Journal of Clinical Oncology - Impact Factor 20.9. The main journal of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, and a really important journal in the field of cancer research.

Journal of Clinical Investigation - Impact factor 12.7. A multidisciplinary science journal, think of it as like a baby Nature. Not 'bad' but the papers here are probably a bit more boring or less relevant to clinical oncology than the ones in J Clin Oncol.

Journal of Pathology - Impact Factor 6.8. This is quite a small journal in a very dull field. It's probably good for boring references that you just need to cite, but none of its papers are going to be very exciting,

International Journal of Breast Cancer - no Impact Factor. This is an open-access journal (i.e. authors pay to publish in it) published by a company in India. All of these things are red flags for being a potentially unreliable article, because these papers have all been rejected by better journals because they are boring, badly written, repetitive with previous research, or flawed.


But really, you should be reading through as many of those 300 papers as you can and forming your own opinions about what the literature says, not just picking papers based on journals and summarising the contents.

Well of course it depends on your topic/field? Nature is a good journal, I don't know why you don't sound keen?

meta-analysis can be useful for getting a bigger picture but they can often be too sweeping of the involved studies and their limitations. I prefer to use them as a way to find more articles, first and foremost.

If they are being strict about which journals you're using to get an idea of how legit they are, just do a google of the ones you are planning on referencing and check out their impact factor (this can often be found on wikipedia, but you will find it elsewhere).

So, I'm working over summer to complete my dissertation before deadline and going back to 4th year med. I've been growing frustrated at my supervisors who are giving little guidance and staunchly critical of what I've elaborated on, sometimes feeling like we're talking two different languages.

One of the comments I got was to choose my journals carefully, I have a Refworks tank of about 300 papers I can use, and naturally after that I went through to skim out the translated papers and some of the more unusual journals, but I tried to focus on meta-analysis, assuming they were the most reliable, all-round accurate type.

Then I was told to even be careful of those, and to focus on Nature......Nature?

So here I am, looking at the Journal of Clinical Investigation, of Clinical Oncology, of Pathology, International Journal of Breast Cancer research and yet despite not being allowed to actually critique my studies, I'm kinda just supposed to know which ones are good.

So, what types of journals/articles are reliable?

International Journal of Breast Cancer - no Impact Factor. This is an open-access journal (i.e. authors pay to publish in it) published by a company in India. All of these things are red flags for being a potentially unreliable article, because these papers have all been rejected by better journals because they are boring, badly written, repetitive with previous research, or flawed.

I mean, they just sound like bad supervisors who aren't trusting you to be able to decide which is a good article and which isn't.




You make it sound like a journal being open access is a bad thing, rather than making science available to developing world doctors and scientists saving lives in the process, and surely the future of science.

Although in the era of sci-hub i guess it matters less.

See, they've asked me to not critique the journals that much, just pick good ones.

So, I'm working over summer to complete my dissertation before deadline and going back to 4th year med. I've been growing frustrated at my supervisors who are giving little guidance and staunchly critical of what I've elaborated on, sometimes feeling like we're talking two different languages.

One of the comments I got was to choose my journals carefully, I have a Refworks tank of about 300 papers I can use, and naturally after that I went through to skim out the translated papers and some of the more unusual journals, but I tried to focus on meta-analysis, assuming they were the most reliable, all-round accurate type.

Then I was told to even be careful of those, and to focus on Nature......Nature?

So here I am, looking at the Journal of Clinical Investigation, of Clinical Oncology, of Pathology, International Journal of Breast Cancer research and yet despite not being allowed to actually critique my studies, I'm kinda just supposed to know which ones are good.

So, what types of journals/articles are reliable?

300 papers is a lot - I wonder if these are focussed enough. Or, in other words, you don't really want to add another couple of hundred to this, as you're never going to be able to use them all and sorting the wheat from the chaff is going to get increasingly difficult.

Have you used Cochrane reviews before? As to your question about impact factors, you need to be slightly careful with them as they can be slightly blunt - they give a general guide to a journal's reputation but they're not a be-all and end-all metric.

What factors do you use when searching the literature to decide whether or not to use a paper? Say you're using Web of Science - do you sort by 'number of times cited' for instance? I presume you've looked at the papers from all the key authors in your field as a starting point?

I've heard of people picking 'good' journals to publish their work in because it will get it more exposure. And I've heard how that's a bad thing because it means no one outside of university circles will ever get to read your paper due to the paywall.

I have never heard of anyone using purely the journal to judge whether an article is good in itself or not. That is just ridiculous.

You make it sound like a journal being open access is a bad thing, rather than making science available to developing world doctors and scientists saving lives in the process, and surely the future of science.