Top vaccine journals in 2023

Announced as The Big Catch-Up, this year’s World Immunization Week focuses on helping countries to get back on track vaccinating its 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

The quality of a journal is measured by a range of journal metrics.

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 journals

How to stay up-to-date with vaccine research developments

Keep abreast of the latest vaccine 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.

As an experienced medcomms agency, Rx understands the challenges faced by researchers in disseminating their work within prestigious journals. We have more than 20 years experience navigating the complexities of the publishing process, and have the skills to help get your research in front of the right audience for maximum impact. If you are interested in learning more about how we can help you get in touch for a free consultation today.

References

• SCImago Journal & Country Rank
• Scopus
• Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals
• World Immunization Week 2023