This page shows impact factors, h5-index and h5-medians associated with journals, as well as their cost and the degree to which they are open access. This shouldn't be taken as endorsement of impact factor metrics: this page is mostly a reflection of the fact that these things matter in the current academic environment. The hope is that by making an easy to view and edit repository that compares the costs and degree of open access of different journals, a more competitive marketplace can emerge, with people publishing not only in high impact factor journals but also choosing those that are reasonably-priced and encourage open sharing of science.

Right now the journals in this list reflect those from the fields of cognitive neuroscience and cognitive psychology, with a particular emphasis on vision science. Feel free to add related journals in psychology and neuroscience. Remember that different fields have different citation norms, and so comparing impact factors and other metrics across fields isn't very useful (Equally "good" neuroscience journals have much higher impact factors than equivalent psychology journals). Similarly, journals that publish a significant amount of work in totally unrelated fields (e.g., Current Biology; Nature Communications) will have high impact factors that do not accurately reflect the average citations received by the psychology and neuroscience work that is published in those journals. Click the column headers to sort the table by that column.

Impact factors relate to the average influence of a given article in a journal. By contrast, h5-index and h5-median are heavily influenced by a journal publishing a lot of papers (e.g., Frontiers) vs. publishing very few (e.g., Psych. Review). In particular, h5-index is the h-index for articles published in the last 5 complete years. It is the largest number h such that h articles published in 2015-2019 have at least h citations each. h5-median for a publication is the median number of citations for the articles that make up its h5-index. So h5 values are not informative for any individual article, but are useful for thinking about what proportion of a field's citations go to which journals.

There are multiple kinds of open access: 'Gold' open access means it is fully available to the public from the journal itself. 'Green' open access means that Articles that are published in a conventional way and then also deposited into some open access central repository such as PubMed Central, or available as a preprint. Keep in mind that 'Green' open access is easily achieved by depositing your work as a preprint, e.g., in PsyArXiv or bioRxiv, so we do not explicitly note it in the table below (post your papers as preprints!).

This page and its information is publicly editable -- click the Edit button on the bottom of the table to keep everything up-to-date. There is a straightforward editor that appears when you click this edit button.

The initial seed data for this table came from and Tim Brady. Impact factors and h5's are current as of 2020. The idea for making this fully editable and available to the community came from Yaoda Xu. The site is hosted by Tim Brady's Vision and Memory lab at UCSD. If you contribute information to the list, people add your name to the list of contributors at the bottom of the Wiki!

Empirical/theoretical journals

Review article journals