JNS Spine is not the same tier as JNS.
Many neurosurgery affiliated journals like JNIS, JNO, etc. are high impact and high visibility for neurosurgeons.
(05-13-2020, 06:29 PM)Guest Wrote: How is operative neurosurgery viewed compared to the red journal? It seems like the red journal transfers all technical papers to operative neurosurgery regardless of quality.
Also am interested in opinions of operative neurosurgery
the impact factor is <2 and it's a new journal; that should pretty much tell you.
(05-16-2020, 07:13 AM)Guest Wrote: (05-13-2020, 06:29 PM)Guest Wrote: How is operative neurosurgery viewed compared to the red journal? It seems like the red journal transfers all technical papers to operative neurosurgery regardless of quality.
Also am interested in opinions of operative neurosurgery
It is a good journal with high standards for what it publishes. Impact factor tells you nothing more than how popular a journal is at the current time.
Long attempt at real talk incoming:
Neurosurgery unfortunately suffers from a serious signal-to-noise ratio problem in the literature (all academic medicine does, but I feel as though we are particularly vulnerable to it given how small and comparably young the field is – there are still instances in neurosurgery were things like case reports have legitimate value which makes even harder to separate the wheat from the chaff). There are legitimately good papers published in the red and white journals, but even there there’s quite a lot of junk, and in the lower level journals it gets really grim in a hurry (of course there are good papers that still end up in these journals for one reason or another, but by and large they are a collection of case reports or small retrospective case series).
Previous posters are correct that most high impact stuff in neurosurgery ends up in more general audience journals – not even necessarily NEJM/JAMA/Nature but high quality subspecialty journals (i.e. vascular stuff may go to Stroke, tumor to Neuro-Oncology, hardcore basic science to PNAS as examples). This is great as far as bringing neurosurgical research to a broader audience, but I think it has a side effect of actually making it challenging for people early in their course of training (i.e. med students and junior residents) to discern good papers from bad, and to critically evaluate the literature, as many folks are taught to read and publish in just the neurosurgery literature and are taught that having as many pubs as possible is the most important thing.
This is a great strategy for getting in to residency/going to a bunch of meetings/having a long CV, but there’s a limit to that runway too. Eventually if you want to have a serious academic job you’re going to need to get funding, and the standards of rigor at a most of the neurosurgery journals and a strategy of quantity over quality will leave you ill-prepared. I have personally known a number of staff who have gotten comments from NIH on K award applications to the effect of ‘publication record consists of mostly case reports and case series in low impact journals.’ Some of that criticism is unfair, as the red/white journals are clearly the journals of record in the field but would still be considered ‘low impact’ to most basic-science types.
Critiques regarding impact factor are also valid in a world where everyone uses pubmed or google scholar as their primary means of finding papers, but are still a relevant surrogate for the quality of a journal – they are a measure of the extent to which work from that journal is cited after all. The is influenced by the size of the field (neurosurgery is tiny, so it’s hardly surprising our journals are lower impact), but within a field they are a pretty good measure of quality.
In short, I think it’s important that people do both. The field is small and evolving enough that there is real benefit to large case series, technical papers, and even case reports, but the bulk of these studies do little more than advance the CV of the authors. This is important still for learning how to write papers and conduct research, but I think it’s critical as people move through their training and careers to try to aim higher, whether that’s through basic/translational lab science, prospective studies, or clinical trials that have the potential to add meaningfully to the field and around which you can really build an academic career.
(05-17-2020, 08:19 PM)Guest Wrote: Long attempt at real talk incoming:
Neurosurgery unfortunately suffers from a serious signal-to-noise ratio problem in the literature (all academic medicine does, but I feel as though we are particularly vulnerable to it given how small and comparably young the field is – there are still instances in neurosurgery were things like case reports have legitimate value which makes even harder to separate the wheat from the chaff). There are legitimately good papers published in the red and white journals, but even there there’s quite a lot of junk, and in the lower level journals it gets really grim in a hurry (of course there are good papers that still end up in these journals for one reason or another, but by and large they are a collection of case reports or small retrospective case series).
Previous posters are correct that most high impact stuff in neurosurgery ends up in more general audience journals – not even necessarily NEJM/JAMA/Nature but high quality subspecialty journals (i.e. vascular stuff may go to Stroke, tumor to Neuro-Oncology, hardcore basic science to PNAS as examples). This is great as far as bringing neurosurgical research to a broader audience, but I think it has a side effect of actually making it challenging for people early in their course of training (i.e. med students and junior residents) to discern good papers from bad, and to critically evaluate the literature, as many folks are taught to read and publish in just the neurosurgery literature and are taught that having as many pubs as possible is the most important thing.
This is a great strategy for getting in to residency/going to a bunch of meetings/having a long CV, but there’s a limit to that runway too. Eventually if you want to have a serious academic job you’re going to need to get funding, and the standards of rigor at a most of the neurosurgery journals and a strategy of quantity over quality will leave you ill-prepared. I have personally known a number of staff who have gotten comments from NIH on K award applications to the effect of ‘publication record consists of mostly case reports and case series in low impact journals.’ Some of that criticism is unfair, as the red/white journals are clearly the journals of record in the field but would still be considered ‘low impact’ to most basic-science types.
Critiques regarding impact factor are also valid in a world where everyone uses pubmed or google scholar as their primary means of finding papers, but are still a relevant surrogate for the quality of a journal – they are a measure of the extent to which work from that journal is cited after all. The is influenced by the size of the field (neurosurgery is tiny, so it’s hardly surprising our journals are lower impact), but within a field they are a pretty good measure of quality.
In short, I think it’s important that people do both. The field is small and evolving enough that there is real benefit to large case series, technical papers, and even case reports, but the bulk of these studies do little more than advance the CV of the authors. This is important still for learning how to write papers and conduct research, but I think it’s critical as people move through their training and careers to try to aim higher, whether that’s through basic/translational lab science, prospective studies, or clinical trials that have the potential to add meaningfully to the field and around which you can really build an academic career.
This is incredible insight, thank you!
Related question, how does co-first authorship look for papers? (regardless of level of journal) - Can both co-first authors put their name first on the CV or is this something residency programs check and criticize?
I think co-first authorship is fine if deployed judiciously. I'd think it weird if you and someone else had multiple papers together as co-first author, but one is fine or multiple with different authors. I would just list it on your CV with the same denotion that the journal uses to signify author order rather than messing with the order itself.
(05-17-2020, 08:19 PM)Guest Wrote: Long attempt at real talk incoming:
Neurosurgery unfortunately suffers from a serious signal-to-noise ratio problem in the literature (all academic medicine does, but I feel as though we are particularly vulnerable to it given how small and comparably young the field is – there are still instances in neurosurgery were things like case reports have legitimate value which makes even harder to separate the wheat from the chaff). There are legitimately good papers published in the red and white journals, but even there there’s quite a lot of junk, and in the lower level journals it gets really grim in a hurry (of course there are good papers that still end up in these journals for one reason or another, but by and large they are a collection of case reports or small retrospective case series).
Previous posters are correct that most high impact stuff in neurosurgery ends up in more general audience journals – not even necessarily NEJM/JAMA/Nature but high quality subspecialty journals (i.e. vascular stuff may go to Stroke, tumor to Neuro-Oncology, hardcore basic science to PNAS as examples). This is great as far as bringing neurosurgical research to a broader audience, but I think it has a side effect of actually making it challenging for people early in their course of training (i.e. med students and junior residents) to discern good papers from bad, and to critically evaluate the literature, as many folks are taught to read and publish in just the neurosurgery literature and are taught that having as many pubs as possible is the most important thing.
This is a great strategy for getting in to residency/going to a bunch of meetings/having a long CV, but there’s a limit to that runway too. Eventually if you want to have a serious academic job you’re going to need to get funding, and the standards of rigor at a most of the neurosurgery journals and a strategy of quantity over quality will leave you ill-prepared. I have personally known a number of staff who have gotten comments from NIH on K award applications to the effect of ‘publication record consists of mostly case reports and case series in low impact journals.’ Some of that criticism is unfair, as the red/white journals are clearly the journals of record in the field but would still be considered ‘low impact’ to most basic-science types.
Critiques regarding impact factor are also valid in a world where everyone uses pubmed or google scholar as their primary means of finding papers, but are still a relevant surrogate for the quality of a journal – they are a measure of the extent to which work from that journal is cited after all. The is influenced by the size of the field (neurosurgery is tiny, so it’s hardly surprising our journals are lower impact), but within a field they are a pretty good measure of quality.
In short, I think it’s important that people do both. The field is small and evolving enough that there is real benefit to large case series, technical papers, and even case reports, but the bulk of these studies do little more than advance the CV of the authors. This is important still for learning how to write papers and conduct research, but I think it’s critical as people move through their training and careers to try to aim higher, whether that’s through basic/translational lab science, prospective studies, or clinical trials that have the potential to add meaningfully to the field and around which you can really build an academic career.
Thanks for the input. I have a first-author paper on a IF >10 journal but it is not neurosurgery research. I have one mid-author paper at a low impact neurosurgery journal. Do you think I need to take a gap year to do more neurosurgery-specific research? Trying to match top programs
Is a letter to editor published in Neurosurgery peer reviewed?
(05-17-2020, 10:45 PM)Guest Wrote: (05-17-2020, 08:19 PM)Guest Wrote: Long attempt at real talk incoming:
Neurosurgery unfortunately suffers from a serious signal-to-noise ratio problem in the literature (all academic medicine does, but I feel as though we are particularly vulnerable to it given how small and comparably young the field is – there are still instances in neurosurgery were things like case reports have legitimate value which makes even harder to separate the wheat from the chaff). There are legitimately good papers published in the red and white journals, but even there there’s quite a lot of junk, and in the lower level journals it gets really grim in a hurry (of course there are good papers that still end up in these journals for one reason or another, but by and large they are a collection of case reports or small retrospective case series).
Previous posters are correct that most high impact stuff in neurosurgery ends up in more general audience journals – not even necessarily NEJM/JAMA/Nature but high quality subspecialty journals (i.e. vascular stuff may go to Stroke, tumor to Neuro-Oncology, hardcore basic science to PNAS as examples). This is great as far as bringing neurosurgical research to a broader audience, but I think it has a side effect of actually making it challenging for people early in their course of training (i.e. med students and junior residents) to discern good papers from bad, and to critically evaluate the literature, as many folks are taught to read and publish in just the neurosurgery literature and are taught that having as many pubs as possible is the most important thing.
This is a great strategy for getting in to residency/going to a bunch of meetings/having a long CV, but there’s a limit to that runway too. Eventually if you want to have a serious academic job you’re going to need to get funding, and the standards of rigor at a most of the neurosurgery journals and a strategy of quantity over quality will leave you ill-prepared. I have personally known a number of staff who have gotten comments from NIH on K award applications to the effect of ‘publication record consists of mostly case reports and case series in low impact journals.’ Some of that criticism is unfair, as the red/white journals are clearly the journals of record in the field but would still be considered ‘low impact’ to most basic-science types.
Critiques regarding impact factor are also valid in a world where everyone uses pubmed or google scholar as their primary means of finding papers, but are still a relevant surrogate for the quality of a journal – they are a measure of the extent to which work from that journal is cited after all. The is influenced by the size of the field (neurosurgery is tiny, so it’s hardly surprising our journals are lower impact), but within a field they are a pretty good measure of quality.
In short, I think it’s important that people do both. The field is small and evolving enough that there is real benefit to large case series, technical papers, and even case reports, but the bulk of these studies do little more than advance the CV of the authors. This is important still for learning how to write papers and conduct research, but I think it’s critical as people move through their training and careers to try to aim higher, whether that’s through basic/translational lab science, prospective studies, or clinical trials that have the potential to add meaningfully to the field and around which you can really build an academic career.
This is incredible insight, thank you!
Related question, how does co-first authorship look for papers? (regardless of level of journal) - Can both co-first authors put their name first on the CV or is this something residency programs check and criticize?
Changing the author order for a co-lead author manuscript as you're suggesting here is considered fraudulent and could really backfire on you. If you're listed second but want to clarify "co-lead" authorship on your cv, you're much better off placing an asterisk after your name and listing it as such.
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