Journal Quality question!

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Hey, I need some advice. I am submitting a case report to a journal but I want the journal to be pubmed indexed because my PI said that that means its a better quality journal. I thought the journal I was submitting to was pubmed indexed then I read this on pubmed:

"Not currently indexed for MEDLINE. Only citations for author manuscripts are included."

What does this mean? Is this journal not a high quality one? Any advice would be appreciated!

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It means exactly what is says, it is not indexed for MEDLINE, thus it is not searchable in PubMed (unless it is not indexed because the journal no longer exists and was prior to MEDLINE indexing, then it still might be searchable in PubMed, which I assume is not your case).

Quality can mean a lot of things, but generally people will refer to quality similar to impact. Impact Factor is a calculation of how many citations per articles published over a 2 year period. The greater the citations per articles, the higher the impact and some would say the higher the quality, but there are flaws with the Impact Factor rating (ie review articles get lots of citations but aren't new discoveries). You can check Impact Factor rating either via Google or by Journal Citation Reports.

Either way, my gestalt is if it not indexed by MEDLINE, I won't submit to it. "Predatory journals" are not indexed.

https://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/dif_med_pub.html
 
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Agree 1000%. The only caveat is that it is a new, and honest journal. It's at least about 2-3 years of publications before real journals show up in PubMed.

There are several ways to find out if a journal is predatory or vanity.

1) Ask your school's librarians. They can dig this up pretty quickly.
2) Do a google search with "journal name" and "predatory" in the search parameters
3) Look up the publisher's address. Do a google maps search on that and go to street view. If it's a private house, it's a fake journal.
4) Avoid anything from the Hindawi or OMICS groups
5) See if the journal and/or publisher are in this website:
https://scholarlyoa.com/2016/01/05/bealls-list-of-predatory-publishers-2016/



Either way, my gestalt is if it not indexed by MEDLINE, I won't submit to it. "Predatory journals" are not indexed.

https://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/dif_med_pub.html
 
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Definitely stick with indexed journals.

One other caveat about impact factors - small specialties have journals with lower impact factors, but this does not mean the journal is of lower quality. It might still be highly regarded by physicians in that speciality. Your preceptor can help you with this.
 
Agree 1000%. The only caveat is that it is a new, and honest journal. It's at least about 2-3 years of publications before real journals show up in PubMed.

There are several ways to find out if a journal is predatory or vanity.

1) Ask your school's librarians. They can dig this up pretty quickly.
2) Do a google search with "journal name" and "predatory" in the search parameters
3) Look up the publisher's address. Do a google maps search on that and go to street view. If it's a private house, it's a fake journal.
4) Avoid anything from the Hindawi or OMICS groups
5) See if the journal and/or publisher are in this website:
https://scholarlyoa.com/2016/01/05/bealls-list-of-predatory-publishers-2016/

If you're doing #2 that's the point you should stop and cross that journal off your list.


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