JAMA Network Impact Factors and the Complete JAMA Submission Guide

JAMA has been published continuously since 1883 and is the flagship of the JAMA Network, the family of peer-reviewed journals published by the American Medical Association. It comes out 48 times a year in print and posts new articles online every weekday. It is also one of the hardest journals in medicine to get into: it accepts 4% of the research papers it receives.

This guide puts everything an author needs in one place: the current JAMA impact factor and those of the other JAMA Network journals, what the journal accepts and how fast it decides, the word and display-item limits for each article type, the figure rules that catch people out, and a checklist to run before you press submit. Every number comes from JAMA Network's own pages, listed under Sources at the end, all checked on 8 November 2026.

JAMA impact factor

JAMA's author page gives its Journal Impact Factor as 65.4, and describes that as placing it among the top three journals in medicine and science. The page does not name the Journal Citation Reports year behind the figure. It was updated in November 2026, after Clarivate's June 2026 release, and JAMA Network's advertising media kit dated January 2026 still listed the previous value of 55 (ranked 4th of 333 journals in its category). So 65.4 is the current figure and 55 the one before it.

JAMA does not publish a five-year impact factor, CiteScore, Eigenfactor or h-index on any of its own pages. If you need one of those for a grant or promotion file, take it from Clarivate's Journal Citation Reports or from Scopus directly and cite that source, not a third-party site.

JAMA Network impact factors

Most searches for a "JAMA Network impact factor" are about one of the specialty journals. JAMA Network has no single metrics page; each journal states its impact factor on its own For Authors page. The table collects them. The "previous" column is the value in the January 2026 media kit.

Two notes on reading it. JAMA Network Open's own 2025 year-in-review article labels its 9.7 as its "2025 Journal Impact Factor", which tells you the network names each value after the year it was released; the 11.7 now on its author page is the newer release. And an impact factor measures citations to a journal, not to your paper. A specialty journal whose readers are exactly your audience can serve a paper better than a general journal with a larger number.

What JAMA publishes, and how selective it is

JAMA is an international general medical journal. Its stated objective is "to promote the science and art of medicine and the betterment of the public health", so a paper has to matter to clinicians and health policy beyond a single specialty. Work that will mainly interest one field usually belongs in the matching JAMA Network specialty journal, and the submission system lets you pre-select automatic referral to one of them, with the reviewers' comments, if JAMA declines.

The journal publishes its own selectivity and speed figures:

• Acceptance rate: 10% of more than 12,700 submissions a year, and 4% of the more than 5,700 research manuscripts.
• Time to first decision (median): 2 days for papers rejected without external review; 24 days for papers sent for review.
• Acceptance to online publication (median): 39 days for research papers.
• JAMA Express: an expedited track with peer review and online publication within 4 weeks of submission, for work that warrants it.
• Peer review model: single-anonymized. Reviewers see the authors' names; authors do not see the reviewers'.

The 2-day median is the number to plan around. Most papers that will not be published at JAMA find out within days, which makes a submission there less costly in time than its acceptance rate suggests.

JAMA article types and length limits

Limits are for the main text only, excluding the abstract, tables, figures, acknowledgments, references and online-only material. "Display items" means tables and figures combined.

A few details the table cannot carry:

• Clinical trials count the CONSORT flow diagram as one of the five display items and must include a CONSORT checklist.
• Systematic reviews put their PRISMA-style flow diagram in the online supplement, not in the main display items.
• Narrative Review abstracts: the instructions give the three-part structured abstract as 400 words in one section and 300 words in another. Write to 300 and you satisfy both.
• Case reports are "very rare" in JAMA, in the journal's own words. A case is more likely to fit the Clinical Challenge format (a 250-word case presentation and a 500–600-word discussion) or a specialty journal.

The structured abstract and Key Points

Every report of original data needs a structured abstract of no more than 350 words under these headings, in this order: Importance, Objective, Design, Setting, and Participants, Intervention(s) or Exposure(s), Main Outcome(s) and Measure(s), Results, Conclusions and Relevance, and, for trials, Trial Registration.

Original Investigations, Brief Reports and Systematic Reviews also need Key Points: a separate section before the abstract with exactly three parts, Question, Findings and Meaning, in 75 to 100 words at most. Editors read the Key Points first. Write the Question as a single answerable question, put the main result with its number in Findings, and keep Meaning to what the result supports, not what you hope it implies.

Open access and fees

JAMA does not list an article processing charge or a paid open-access option on its author pages. Instead, JAMA makes all of its research articles free to read on its website six months after publication, and authors may deposit their accepted manuscript from the date of acceptance as long as it is not made public before the article is published.

The paid open-access options sit with the other journals. Every JAMA Network specialty journal offers an open access option with waiver and discount policies, and JAMA Network Open, which is fully open access, charges an APC of $4000. At JAMA Network Open, the CC-BY licence is available only for research funded by a not-for-profit foundation or a government agency. Check your funder's licence requirement before you choose a journal in the network.

How to submit to JAMA

1. Check fit and type. Decide the article type from the table above. For a systematic or narrative review, a special communication or a diagnostic test interpretation, send a presubmission inquiry first; for those types it is required.
2. Prepare the manuscript as a Word file. JAMA asks for a Word document, not a PDF, in a 10-, 11- or 12-point font with double-spaced text. Keep each file small (500 kB to 1 MB) and all files together under 5 MB. Figures can be embedded at the end of the file for initial review.
3. Write the cover letter. It must include complete contact details for the corresponding author (affiliation, postal address, email and telephone) and state whether the authors have published, posted or submitted any related papers from the same study.
4. Disclose any preprint. Preprinted manuscripts are considered, but you must give the preprint's details and a link at submission.
5. Include previous reviews if you have them. If the paper was reviewed at another journal, JAMA encourages you to submit those comments in full with your responses.
6. Assemble the required documents: the reporting-guideline checklist for your design, the trial protocol with its complete statistical analysis plan (for trials), a Data Sharing Statement, and the Authorship Form, which includes each author's disclosure of potential conflicts of interest.
7. Submit through JAMA's online system at manuscripts.jama.com, and decide whether to pre-select referral to a specialty journal.

JAMA figure requirements

JAMA's approach to figures differs from most journals in one important way: graphs, charts, some illustrations, titles, legends and keys in accepted papers are re-created by JAMA's own art staff in JAMA Network style. What you submit has to be accurate and editable, not polished. That is why the current instructions give no column widths or font sizes for main figures: the journal sets those itself. (An older technical PDF still hosted on the site mentions a 5-inch minimum width for photographs; the current instructions do not.)

The style rules are where most figures need rework:

• No pie charts, 3-D graphs or stacked bar charts. Redraw them as bar or dot charts.
• Ratio data on a log scale. Odds ratios, hazard ratios and relative risks belong on a logarithmic axis.
• Error bars in both directions, not only above the bar.
• Every axis labelled, with units.
• Letters for footnotes (a, b, c), not symbols.
• Two versions of any figure with markers such as arrows or asterisks on an image: one with the markers and one without.

Because the art staff redraw from your files, send the export from your graphing program rather than a screenshot or a flattened image. A forest plot for a meta-analysis or a Kaplan-Meier curve for survival data should arrive with its numbers recoverable. For trial flow, the CONSORT diagram generator builds the flow chart from your counts, and the PRISMA flow diagram tool does the same for systematic reviews.

Image integrity and AI-generated images

Brightness, contrast or colour adjustments are allowed only if applied uniformly to the whole image and only if they do not selectively highlight, misrepresent, obscure or remove any clinical or scientific element. Adjusting one element of an image is not permitted. Clinical images and clinical illustrations created or manipulated by artificial intelligence are not permitted at all, unless the AI is part of the study's formal design or methods.

References, style and statistics

• Style manual: the AMA Manual of Style, 11th edition.
• References: numbered in the order cited, with superscript arabic numerals, never alphabetized. List up to six authors; with more than six, list the first three followed by "et al."
• Units: conventional units first, with Système International conversion factors in parentheses at first mention.
• Statistics: never report a P value on its own without the data being compared, and use causal language only for randomized clinical trials.
• Reporting guidelines: JAMA expects research to follow the EQUATOR guidelines, naming CONSORT for trials, STROBE for observational studies, PRISMA and MOOSE for systematic reviews and meta-analyses, STARD or TRIPOD for diagnostic and prediction studies, SQUIRE for quality improvement, CHEERS for economic evaluations and SPIRIT for protocols.

Data, registration and AI policies

• Trial registration in an ICMJE-acceptable public registry is a condition of consideration, and trial reports must include the protocol and statistical analysis plan.
• Data Sharing Statement: every research report must say whether, and how, data will be shared.
• Conflicts of interest: all authors disclose all relevant financial relationships, regardless of amount, in the Authorship Form.
• AI use: any use of AI or large language models to help create, revise or format content must be reported in the Acknowledgment section, with the tool's name, version and manufacturer, the dates used and what it did. AI must not be used to generate or format references, and Opinion pieces, letters and online comments may not be drafted with it.

Pre-submission checklist for JAMA

• The paper's importance reaches beyond one specialty; otherwise target the matching JAMA Network journal.
• Article type chosen, with a presubmission inquiry sent if the type requires one.
• Main text within the word limit, and tables plus figures within the display-item limit.
• Structured abstract under the required headings, 350 words or fewer.
• Key Points with Question, Findings and Meaning, 100 words or fewer.
• Manuscript in Word (not PDF), 10–12 pt, double spaced, files under 5 MB in total.
• Cover letter with full corresponding-author contacts and a statement on related papers.
• Preprint, if any, disclosed with a link.
• Reporting-guideline checklist, protocol (for trials), registration number, Data Sharing Statement and Authorship Form ready.
• Figures: no pie, 3-D or stacked bar charts; ratios on log scales; error bars both ways; axes labelled with units; 4 panels or fewer.
• Photographs at 350 ppi or more and line drawings at 600 ppi or more, in RGB. Check the pixel counts with the image DPI checker.
• Figure titles of 10 to 15 words and complete legends. The figure legend generator helps you set out a consistent title, panel descriptions and statistics.
• Colours that still separate groups for colour-blind readers, checked in the colorblind simulator.
• No AI-generated clinical images, and only whole-image adjustments to any photograph.
• References in AMA style, numbered in order of citation, none generated by an AI tool.
• Any AI use described in the Acknowledgment section.

Related guides and tools

For the figure specifications of other publishers side by side, see journal figure requirements by publisher; our general journal submission figure checklist covers the checks every journal shares. If you are weighing JAMA against a general science journal, the guides to Nature, PNAS and Science Advances set out the same details for each.

A visual summary is useful for talks, posters and social posts about a published paper, even though JAMA's own figures are drawn in house. The graphical abstract maker drafts one from a description of the study. Do not submit its output to JAMA as a clinical image, since the journal does not accept AI-generated clinical images.

Sources

All pages are from JAMA Network and the American Medical Association, checked 8 November 2026.

• JAMA: For Authors (impact factor, acceptance rate, decision times, frequency, ISSN)
• JAMA: Instructions for Authors (article types, abstracts, Key Points, submission, figures, image integrity, references, policies; last updated 8 September 2026)
• JAMA Network 2026 advertising media kit (PDF) (previous impact factors)
• For Authors pages of JAMA Internal Medicine, JAMA Oncology, JAMA Neurology, JAMA Psychiatry, JAMA Pediatrics, JAMA Surgery, JAMA Cardiology, JAMA Health Forum, JAMA Network Open, JAMA Dermatology, JAMA Ophthalmology and JAMA Otolaryngology–Head & Neck Surgery (current impact factors)
• JAMA Network Open—The Year in Review, 2025 (how the network labels impact factor years)
• JAMA Network Open: Instructions for Authors (APC and licences)
• Access at JAMA Network (free access after 6 months; specialty journal open access options)