Publishing Pecking Order

My last post on dinosaur flesh reminded me that many of you are not familiar with scientific literature so I thought I would give a quick tutorial. First there is a distinction between popular science publications and primary journals. They are not necessarily easy to differentiate by name. For example, Scientific American is a popular science magazine--it is geared toward the educated lay person. It does not publish actual research, though it may report on research published elsewhere in the primary literature.

Primary research articles are contained in innumerable journals. This is where the nuts and bolts of research are reported. Each discipline has its own hierarchy of journals. Some journals are bread-and-butter journals. However there are several publications that form a sort of hub. Nature Magazine, Science Magazine, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)--are all prestigious journals (probably in that order) that cover a wide range of scientific disciplines. Nature has several more specialized journals that are also prestigious. Some people go their whole career without publishing in one of these journals. Really good researchers publish there repeatedly. Now this doesn't mean that every article in these publications is flawless--you can find bad papers in any journal. But when you see the names Nature, Science, or PNAS, a little flag should go up and remind you that these are journals that are pretty selective in what they publish.