JAMA Impact Factor: 65.4 (2025 JCR) — Every JAMA Network Journal, Ranked

JAMA Network impact factors at a glance

The JAMA Network is JAMA, JAMA Network Open, and eleven specialty journals, published by the American Medical Association. Each journal posts its own Journal Impact Factor, acceptance rate and median decision times on its About page, which is where every number in this table comes from.

The first decision column carries a distinction worth reading correctly. The short number is the median time to a decision without external peer review — in practice, how fast the desk says no. The longer number is the median when the paper goes out for review. JAMA Internal Medicine’s median of 1 day for an unreviewed decision means most rejections arrive before you have stopped refreshing your inbox, which is a kindness compared to the alternative.

What is the impact factor of JAMA?

65.4, which JAMA describes as among the top 3 journals in medicine and science.

The number sits on a very narrow funnel. JAMA receives more than 12,700 submissions a year and accepts 10% of them — but for research manuscripts specifically, the rate is 4% of more than 5,700. The 10% figure is padded by article types with better odds; a cohort study or trial faces roughly one chance in twenty-five.

What JAMA offers in exchange is speed. Median time to first decision is 2 days without external review and 24 days with it, and accepted research reaches online-first publication in a median of 39 days. JAMA Express compresses the whole pipeline further: expedited review and online publication within 4 weeks of submission, for late-breaking research presented at major scientific meetings. The journal is also unusual among the giants in charging no author fees and making all research articles free access 6 months after publication.

For scale: 65.4 puts JAMA above Nature’s 2025 JIF of 56.1. A weekly medical journal outranking Nature surprises people until they look at what the JIF measures — citations in the two years after publication, a window that favours clinical trials and guidelines, which get cited immediately, over basic science that takes years to percolate. Our PNAS impact factor guide works through the same mechanism from the other side, for a journal the two-year window systematically undersells.

What is the impact factor of JAMA Network Open?

11.7, which the journal describes as the highest among large-volume general medicine open access journals.

That framing is the honest way to read the number. JAMA Network Open is not a lower-quality JAMA; it is a different publishing model inside the same editorial house — fully open access, publishing research across more than 40 medical and health subject areas, under what the journal states are the same peer review, editorial and publishing standards as JAMA and the specialty journals. The comparison group for 11.7 is PLOS Medicine and BMJ Open, not the flagship one floor up.

The $4,000 article processing charge applies to research articles under either of the journal’s two open access licenses, with waivers and discounts for eligible authors from Hinari Core Offer countries. A 12% acceptance rate deserves a moment’s attention next to that fee: this is an open access journal that declines seven of every eight submissions, which is not the economics most people associate with APC-funded publishing.

One more path into the family worth knowing about. The network states that selected manuscripts submitted to JAMA and not accepted may be referred to one of the specialty journals with the author’s permission — so a JAMA submission is, in effect, an application to the family, with the desk-reject day doubling as a routing decision.

How the eleven specialty journals rank

Every specialty journal in the family is at or near the top of its JCR category, and their About pages say so with unusual precision:

• JAMA Internal Medicine (26.3), JAMA Oncology (23.9) and JAMA Cardiology (15.2) each describe their JIF as among the highest in their categories.
• JAMA Pediatrics (17.1), JAMA Surgery (15.6) and JAMA Otolaryngology–Head & Neck Surgery (7) each claim the top position — the highest-ranking journal in their fields worldwide.
• JAMA Neurology (23.6), JAMA Psychiatry (18) and JAMA Ophthalmology (10.5) each state third place in their categories.
• JAMA Health Forum (12.5) claims first among health policy and services journals, and JAMA Dermatology (10.9) among the highest in dermatology.

Two readings follow from the same table. If you are choosing by prestige within your specialty, the JIF differences between these journals mostly reflect how their fields cite, not how good the journals are — 7 in otolaryngology buys the same category-leading position as 17.1 in pediatrics. If you are choosing by odds, the acceptance rates run in a narrow band from 6% (Neurology) to 12% (Health Forum, Network Open, Otolaryngology), so nothing in the family is a soft target.

Where these numbers come from

Every impact factor above is quoted from the journal’s own About page as of August 14, 2026. The underlying source is Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports 2026 release, published June 17, 2026, which reports 2025 citation data — so all of these are 2025 Journal Impact Factors, the most recent that exist. Clarivate computes the number; the journals restate it.

The acceptance rates and decision times are a different kind of claim: the journals publish those themselves, and no independent body audits them. The JAMA Network is more forthcoming here than almost any publisher — most journals at this level publish no acceptance rate at all — but the numbers are still self-reported, and the About pages do not state which year they cover.

The category-rank statements ("highest ranking surgery journal in the world") are the journals’ own characterisations of their JCR standing. The full JCR tables sit behind a Clarivate subscription, so we quote the claims as claims and attribute them.

The figure requirements every JAMA Network journal shares

The thirteen journals share one set of author instructions for artwork, and the single most important thing in it is a policy, not a number: JAMA re-creates your figures. Graphs, charts, some illustrations, titles, legends and keys in accepted manuscripts are redrawn and edited to JAMA Network style before publication. You are not producing the published figure; you are producing the source material for it.

That changes where the effort belongs. Polishing house styling is wasted work — it will be replaced. What survives the redraw is the data structure, and what blocks acceptance is failing the file requirements below.

The resolution rule has a clause that catches people: it must be met at the time the image is created. Upscaling a low-resolution file afterward is named explicitly as unacceptable — the instructions call the result a breakdown of detail — and the request that follows will be for the image as originally captured.

The exception to the redraw policy matters just as much. Online-only supplement figures are published as submitted, without editing or re-creation. The eFigure you export is the eFigure readers see, which is why the instructions bother to specify Arial at 10 points and 300 dpi for supplementary photographs. The main-text figures have a production department behind them; the supplement has only you.

The figure rules that surprise authors

Beyond file mechanics, the shared instructions ban some figure types outright and regulate others in ways few journals put in writing.

Three chart types are prohibited. Pie charts, 3-D graphs and stacked bar charts are named as inappropriate for accurate statistical presentation, to be revised into another figure type or converted to a table. If your primary outcome lives in a stacked bar chart, it is getting redrawn whether you agree or not.

Statistical conventions are enforced as figure requirements. Ratio data — odds ratios, relative risks, hazard ratios — must be plotted on a log scale, and must not be log-transformed instead. Error bars go in both directions unless variability was genuinely one-sided. Survival curves are drawn as step functions, never smoothed, with the number at risk shown under the x-axis. Every axis carries a label and units, frequency axes start at zero unbroken, and figures should not exceed 4 panels without justification.

Primary outcomes cannot live in figures alone. Exact values with measures of variability must also appear in the text or a table, and in the abstract. A figure at JAMA is a display of the data, never the only copy of it.

Labelled images need an unlabelled twin. Any photograph, photomicrograph or gel carrying arrows, labels or markers must be submitted in two versions — one clean, one marked — so editors can see what the annotation is doing to the image underneath.

The image-integrity rules are the standard modern set, precisely worded. Brightness, contrast and colour adjustments are permitted only when applied uniformly to the whole image, and only when they do not obscure or eliminate anything — the background included. Elements may not be moved, deleted or inserted. Composites must declare themselves with dividing lines, borders or panel labels. When journal staff detect a violation, the request is for the original file as captured, before any adjustment, cropping or labelling.

AI-generated clinical images are barred. Clinical images and clinical illustrations created or manipulated by AI or machine learning tools are not permitted unless they are part of the formal research design or methods, fully disclosed — and the author remains responsible for the integrity of anything such tools touched.

Patient photographs have their own floor. Black bars across the eyes are explicitly not acceptable as de-identification. If a person is possibly identifiable — including to themselves — a signed JAMA Network Patient Permission form is required, and cropping is acceptable only while the condition under discussion stays visible.

Display-item budgets are set per article type: reports of original research get no more than 5 tables and/or figures in 3,000 words, and for clinical trials that total includes the CONSORT flow diagram — the one figure no trial can skip, and a close cousin of the PRISMA flow diagram required in the systematic reviews the network publishes. Research Letters get 2 small display items in 800 words. And although authors do not submit one, the network produces visual abstracts for selected articles as part of its promotion machinery — if an editor asks what your study would look like as one, our graphical abstract guide covers the format’s conventions.

Frequently asked questions

What is the impact factor of JAMA? 65.4, per the 2026 Journal Citation Reports release reporting 2025 data. JAMA describes this as among the top 3 journals in medicine and science. The acceptance rate is 10% overall and 4% for research manuscripts.

What is the impact factor of JAMA Network Open? 11.7 — the highest among large-volume general medicine open access journals, by the journal’s own description. Acceptance is 12%, first decisions take a median of 2 days without review and 46 with, and the article processing charge is $4,000.

Which JAMA journal has the highest impact factor? JAMA at 65.4, then JAMA Internal Medicine at 26.3, JAMA Oncology at 23.9 and JAMA Neurology at 23.6. The lowest, JAMA Otolaryngology–Head & Neck Surgery at 7, still claims the top JCR position in its field — category citation habits, not journal quality, set the spread.

How much does it cost to publish in JAMA Network Open? $4,000 per research article, under either open access license, with waivers for eligible authors from Hinari Core Offer countries. JAMA itself charges no author fees.

Is JAMA Network Open the same journal as JAMA? No. JAMA is the 1883-vintage flagship at 65.4; JAMA Network Open is the network’s open access general medicine journal at 11.7. They share editorial standards and a submission ecosystem in which declined JAMA manuscripts can be referred onward with the author’s permission.

What resolution do JAMA Network journals require for figures? At least 350 ppi for photographs, clinical images and illustrations, and at least 600 ppi for line drawings, met at the time of image creation. Graphs belong in vector formats, not raster images.

How many figures can a JAMA paper have? No more than 5 tables and/or figures combined for reports of original research, including the CONSORT flow diagram for trials. Research Letters allow 2 small display items.

Does JAMA redraw submitted figures? Yes — graphs, charts, titles, legends and keys are re-created in JAMA Network style after acceptance. Online-only eFigures are the exception and publish exactly as submitted.

Where to go next

The JAMA family table rewards one habit: reading the acceptance rate and the impact factor together. A 65.4 built on a 4% research acceptance rate and an 11.7 built on a 12% rate are not two qualities of journal so much as two widths of the same funnel, run by the same editors, feeding the same production department that will redraw your figures either way.

For how a citation window this favourable to medicine treats other fields, our Nature impact factor guide covers the journal JAMA now outranks, and our PNAS impact factor guide covers the opposite citation shape — a journal whose influence the two-year window mostly misses. If a JAMA Network editor invites a visual abstract, our graphical abstract requirements guide maps the format across publishers.