JAMA publishes a 65.4 Impact Factor on its own author pages, alongside a 10% acceptance rate, 4% for research papers, and a 2-day first decision.
Alex Carter
Founder, SciFig
JAMA's Journal Impact Factor is 65.4 — the 2025 value, from the 2026 JCR release.
JAMA is unusual among large medical journals in publishing that number itself, together with the two figures most authors ask for next: how many submissions it accepts, and how quickly it decides.
What is JAMA's impact factor?
JAMA states on its own author pages that its Journal Impact Factor is 65.4, and describes itself as among the top 3 journals in medicine and science. Because Clarivate labels its 2026 JCR release as reflecting 2025 data, the precise phrasing is "JAMA's 2025 Journal Impact Factor, 2026 JCR release: 65.4".
That value describes the journal, not your manuscript. JAMA accepts 10% of everything it receives and 4% of research papers, so the number that actually predicts your outcome is the acceptance rate, not the citation score.
JAMA at a glance
Before the score decides anything, check whether your evidence package and every scientific figure in it fit what JAMA publishes.
Every row here comes from JAMA's own author-facing pages rather than from a metrics aggregator.
You searched 2026 — why this is the 2025 JIF
The year in your search box is usually the year you are doing the work, not the year the metric covers. Clarivate's 2026 JCR release reports 2025 citation data, so 65.4 is a 2025 Journal Impact Factor published in 2026.
Carry both labels whenever you compare journals. A 2025 JIF next to a 2024 JIF is not a comparison — it is a two-year gap dressed up as one.
Is JAMA Q1? Quartile and category rank
Yes. JAMA states that its Impact Factor of 65.4 puts it among the top 3 journals in medicine and science, and a JCR quartile is simply a position band inside a subject category: Q1 means the top 25% of journals in that category by Impact Factor. A journal that its publisher places in the top handful of an entire field sits in Q1 by any reading of that definition.
What JAMA does not publish on its author pages is the JCR category rank itself — the "n of N in Medicine, General & Internal" line. If a grant form or promotion file asks for the exact rank, that field comes from the Journal Citation Reports record, not from the journal.
JAMA vs Nature Medicine and other general medical journals
The useful comparison is not which score is bigger. It is which journal publishes the kind of paper you have.
JAMA is a general medical journal built around clinical trials, cohort studies, and health policy, with tight article-type limits — an Original Investigation gets 3000 words and five display items. Nature Medicine is a translational and clinical journal in the Nature Portfolio, with longer articles and a different production pipeline.
Run both through the same checklist: scope, article type, display-item budget, cost, and the figure specification you will have to hit. The JAMA formatting requirements answer the last one.
What this number does not tell you
The Impact Factor does not tell you:
whether an editor will send your paper out for review at all — JAMA's median first decision without external review is 2 days;
which article type your work belongs to, and therefore which word and figure limits apply;
whether your figures meet the resolution and file-format rules for publication;
what the journal's AI policy allows for the images you are planning;
or how the six-month free-access window affects your funder's requirements.
Preparing figures for JAMA
JAMA sets minimum resolutions by figure type — 350 ppi for illustrations, photographs and clinical images, 600 ppi for line drawings — and only accepts a narrow list of file formats at revision. It also re-creates most graphs and charts in house, so a figure that is technically acceptable can still be redrawn.
The full JAMA formatting guide covers formats, colour mode, and the two-version rule for labelled images.
If the figure already exists, Vector Canvas turns it into editable vector layers — every shape, label, and colour becomes a separate object you can correct — and exports layered SVG.
Figure Enhancer takes a figure you already have and refines its text, improves clarity, and upscales it to 8K without starting over; labels and layout stay editable afterwards.
For grant, conference, institutional, or teaching work where AI-generated visuals are allowed, you can also explore Text-to-Figure for a new generated draft.
Check the figure rules before you pick an article type
JAMA combines word limits, display-item caps, and resolution minimums. Read the whole package before you lock the layout.
Consider JAMA when the work changes clinical practice or health policy for a broad medical audience, and when the manuscript can survive an editorial screen that turns most papers away in 2 days.
Think twice when the finding is specialist rather than general, when the evidence package needs more than five display items, or when your timeline cannot absorb a 24-day median for a reviewed decision plus revision. Papers not accepted by JAMA can be referred, with the reviewer comments, to a JAMA Network specialty journal or JAMA Network Open — so a JAMA submission is rarely a dead end.
The JAMA submission guide walks through article types, the two decision paths, and what the six-month free-access window means for a funder mandate.
Turn your evidence into a submission-ready figure
Build the figure to the journal's published specification instead of reformatting it after a revision request.
