Announced as The Big Catch-Up, this year's World Immunization Week focuses on helping countries to get back on track vaccinating their people to protect them against preventable diseases. It's a challenging task. In a time when disinformation and misinformation feel like they've become a small part of our global psyche, global leaders, researchers, policy makers, health regulators, health professionals, and even pro-vaccine Joe Public will benefit from knowing where to access evidence-based vaccine information and research updates.
Why vaccine journal choice matters
With many vaccines in use worldwide, and more in the development pipeline, well-respected journals are an invaluable vaccine resource.
To support this, we've updated our list of the top-ranked international vaccine journals for 2023. We've also included two broader immunology journals that also include peer-reviewed vaccine research articles and discussions.
'Open access' is referred to several times below and refers to journals that charge no fees to access their content. Their funding model relies more on public funding and processing fees charged to authors.
How journal quality is measured
Impact factor
Impact factor is based on Web of Science data and only includes documents such as articles and reviews. It measures the average number of times an article is cited by other journal articles and documents. An impact factor of 3 or more is considered good; 1 is average. This list uses the 2-year impact factor from SCImago.
CiteScore
CiteScore is based on Scopus data for all indexed documents, including articles, letters and editorials. Like impact factor, it measures the average citations received per document published in a journal over a 4-year time period.
Impact factor and CiteScore have the most meaning when used to compare journals within the same therapeutic area or subject. Many academics value a journal's impact factor over its Citescore; therefore they will use the impact factor to rank other journals in the same field.
SCImago Journal Rank (SJR)
SJR measures the citations received from a journal but it also considers the importance of the journal where the citations have come from. This measurement can be helpful to rank journals within the same field and category.
Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP)
SNIP measures citations weighted by subject field. A SNIP over 1.0 means a journal has more citations than average.
H-Index
H-Index is the number of papers published in a journal (h) that have been cited at least (h) times. For example, if a journal has published 50 papers and each of those papers have been cited by other authors at least 50 times, the H-index of the journal is 50. The higher the H-Index, the higher quality the journal.
Top ranked Vaccine & Immunology journals
npj Vaccines
npj vaccine & immunologys is a journal included in the Nature Partner Journals' portfolio, published by Springer Nature in partnership with the Sealy Institute for Vaccine Science. It's an online, open access journal that publishes the latest vaccine research, as well as editorials, news and case reports.
- Website: https://www.nature.com/npjvaccines/
- Impact Factor: 8.461
- CiteScore: 9.4
- SJR: 2.953
- SNIP: 1.991
- H-Index: 30
Expert Review of Vaccines
Expert Review of Vaccines is an international, peer-reviewed journal published monthly. In 2023, the journal became a full open access journal. The journal focuses on new vaccines and includes reviews, original research and editorials.
- Website: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ierv20/current
- Impact Factor: 5.199
- CiteScore: 8
- SJR: 1.689
- SNIP: 1.588
- H-Index: 91
Human Vaccines and Immunotherapeutics
Human Vaccines and Immunotherapeutics is published by Taylor and Francis and sponsored by the International Society for Vaccines. The journal publishes research articles, reviews, commentaries and case reports that discuss the latest developments in vaccinology and immunotherapy. In 2022, the journal became a full open access journal.
- Website: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/khvi20/current
- Impact Factor: 3.977
- CiteScore: 5.5
- SJR: 1.073
- SNIP: 1.361
- H-Index: 69
Vaccines
Vaccines is another open access journal published monthly. It focuses on vaccine research and immunisation. Recent articles cover such topics as clinical characteristics and outcomes among COVID-19 positive patients with cardiovascular disease, the impact of a revised national childhood immunisation schedule in Singapore, and the contributing factors that could promote or inhibit human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine uptake for adults.
- Website: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/vaccines
- Impact Factor: 4.816
- CiteScore: 4.5
- SJR: 1.004
- SNIP: 1.167
- H-Index: 50
Vaccine
Vaccine, published by Elsevier, publishes a wide range of research papers, review articles, and discussion papers related to all fields of vaccinology, including research, vaccine history and safety. Vaccine is the official journal of the Japanese Society for Vaccinology. Vaccine: X is the journal's open access companion journal, with a CiteScore of 3.9.
- Website: https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/vaccine/
- Impact Factor: 3.843
- CiteScore: 6.7
- SJR: 1.392
- SNIP: 1.395
- H-Index: 191
Tropical Diseases, Travel Medicine and Vaccines
As the name suggests, preventing and managing travel-related diseases is this journal's niche. The journal is open access and is particularly relevant to health professionals working within travel medicine. The journal includes basic, translational and applied research, and is published by BioMed Central (BMC).
- Website: https://tdtmvjournal.biomedcentral.com/
- Impact Factor: 3.056
- CiteScore: 3.9
- SJR: 0.734
- SNIP: 1.16
- H-Index: 16
Clinical and Experimental Vaccine Research
The Clinical and Experimental Vaccine Research journal is published three times a year and is the official journal of the Korean Vaccine Society. The journal offers open access articles that focus on research and development of vaccines.
- Website: https://ecevr.org/
- Impact Factor: 1.952
- CiteScore: 3.4
- SJR: 0.55
- SNIP: 0.677
- H-Index: 13
Nature Reviews Immunology
Nature Reviews Immunology is a highly ranked immunology journal. Each monthly issue covers a broad range of subject areas related to immunology such as autoimmunity and innate immunity, and also includes articles about vaccine development. The latest issue features a research highlight that looks at immune dysregulation in Down syndrome and a review article examining the role of extracellular vesicles in the immune system.
- Website: https://www.nature.com/nri/
- Impact Factor: 31.590
- CiteScore: 70.8
- SJR: 17.109
- SNIP: 8.566
- H-Index: 417
Immunity
Like Nature Reviews Immunology journal, Immunity is a journal that focuses on all topics related to immunity but in some issues includes vaccine research.
- Website: https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/immunity
- Impact Factor: 28.272
- CiteScore: 46.0
- SJR: 14.075
- SNIP: 6.072
- H-Index: 417
How to stay up-to-date with vaccine & immunology research developments
Keep abreast of the latest vaccine & immunology research by:
- registering for an account with highly ranked journals
- setting up and customising an RSS feed for journals
- setting up a Google alert using various vaccination keywords
- following journals and publishers on social media
- signing up to our newsletter, we regularly update the top lists of journals for many different therapeutic areas
