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Scholarly Publishing

This LibGuide on Scholarly Publishing shows you how to select and vet credible journals as well as informs you about your author rights.

Choosing a Journal

There are three things to look for when you are evaluating academic journals to find a journal to publish in.

Journal Fit  Fit is deciding whether or not the journal is a good fit/match with your respective research.
 

Impact  Impact is assessing the journal impact, including citation-based impact factors, altmetrics, and the impact of OA  journals.
 

Quality   Quality is considering how a journal relates to scholarly community standards, including evaluating  practices used in predatory publishing

 

This section "Nuts and Bolts of Scholarly Publishing: Home" by UW Libraries was used under the license CC-BY-NC 4.0

1. Fit

Try a "journal recommender" -- these are tools that analyze your paper (usually the title and abstract) and suggest journals that might fit your paper's subject area:

Journal/Author Name Estimator (JANE) – PubMed
Jane compares your document (or keywords) to the PubMed database to find matching journals, authors or articles. Best for medical/health sciences disciplines.

Web of Science Manuscript Matcher
You will need to create a free account to access Match.

Publisher specific journal recommenders:
Elsevier Journal Finder

IEEE Publication Recommender

Sage Journal Recommender

SpringerNature Journal Suggestor

Taylor & Francis Journal Suggestor

Wiley Journal Finder (Beta)

  1. alignment between your work and the scope or coverage of the publisher's list, imprint or journal;
  2. reputation in your field of the publisher's list, imprint or journal;
  3. the name and contact information for the journal is readily found on its website;
  4. discovery and visibility;
  5. terms under which the publisher will publish your work, e.g. who has rights control over the use and reuse of your work, payments, etc.;
  6. peer review or research verification services provided;
  7. editorial, marketing and distribution services provided;
  8. information for prospective authors, including submission requirements and policies (such as plagiarism and research misconduct), and the journal's copyright policy, are clearly stated and easy to find on the journal's website;
  9. professional memberships;
  10. potential financial costs. Information on fees charged is clearly communicated and easy to find on the journal's website.

2. Impact

What is Journal Impact Factor (JIF)?

The Journal Impact Factor is a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year. The Journal Impact Factor is found in WoS InCites Journal Citation Reports. The Journal Impact Factor has sometimes been used inappropriately as a proxy for quality. It is used by the vendor Clarivate Analytics to measure the importance or rank of a journal by calculating the times its articles are cited. 

What are the limitations of JIF?

  • Extension of the impact factor to the assessment of journal quality or individual authors is inappropriate
  • JIF can be biased and easily gamed
  • Extension of the impact factor to cross-discipline journal comparisons is inappropriate

The Eigenfactor Score measures the number of times articles from the journal published in the past five years have been cited in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) year.

Like the Impact Factor, the Eigenfactor Score is essentially a ratio of number of citations to total number of articles. However, unlike the Impact Factor, the Eigenfactor Score:

  • Counts citations to journals in both the sciences and social sciences.
  • Eliminates self-citations. Every reference from one article in a journal to another article from the same journal is discounted.
  • Weights each reference according to a stochastic measure of the amount of time researchers spend reading the journal.

Another alternative to JIF is Google Scholar Top Publications - this ranking displays a journal's h5-index.

The h-index is the largest number h such that at least h articles in that publication were each cited at least h times each in the last 5 years.

Altmetrics is an alternative metric of impact; alternative indicators include download counts, patent mentions, how many times an article has been bookmarked, blogged about or cited in Wikipedia etc. While Altmetrics are generally author or article-level measures, investigating Altmetrics of articles in a journal can tell you about the level of engagement that the journal receives from the public and the policy community. Some article records will display links to these metrics (often from Altmetric or Plum Analytics).

3. Quality

Why do we peer review?

Peer review ensures quality and validity.  Ideally, peer review can produce higher quality published scholarly works and it can improve your paper with feedback from experts

What are the types of peer review?

  • Single blind peer review: The author is not aware of the identity of the reviewers, but the reviewers know the identity of the author. Bias may be a risk
  • Double blind peer review: Neither the author nor the reviewers know each other’s identities. This process controls for bias, but has been criticized for lacking transparency.
  • Open peer review: The identities of authors/reviewers are known to all participants (and sometimes reviews are published along with the work).
  • Transferable peer review: The journal's editor can suggest that articles not recommended by reviewers be submitted to another journal in the publisher’s portfolio along with the review.

This section "Evaluating Journals: Quality (Peer Review)" by UW Libraries was used under the license CC-BY-NC 4.0
 

What is the peer review process?

  1. Author submits article to a journal.
  2. Managing editor determines if it is suitable for review.
    1. If no, the submission is immediately rejected without being sent out to peer reviewers.
    2. If yes, the submission is distributed to peer reviewers.
  3. Peer reviewers recommend one of the following:
    1. Accept without revisions
    2. Accept pending revisions
    3. Reject
  4. After completing revisions, author resubmits the revised article to managing editor.
  5. The managing editor or peer reviewers determine if revisions are sufficient.
    1. If yes, the article is accepted for publication.
    2. If no, the article is rejected.
    3. If more revisions are required, author restarts at step 4.

What is predatory publishing?

A small subset of open access journals with deceptive publishing practices, that charge large APC fees and fail to do rigorous peer review of their articles. This results in very low quality research. Predatory journals try to capitalize on the academic's pressure to "publish or perish".

What are some tools to help you avoid predatory publishers?

  • Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) - Directory of high quality, peer reviewed Open Access journals.
  • Think. Check. Submit. It is a checklist that researchers can use to evaluate the credentials of a journal/publisher.
  • Be iNFORMED -  It is a checklist developed by Duke University Medical Library to help authors decide whether a journal or publisher is potentially predatory.
  • Cabell's Scholarly Analytics and Predatory Reports - With Cabell's Predatory Reports, specialists examine each journal against dozens of evolving criteria, rigorously screening for misleading metrics, irregular publication practices, and other warning signs. Predatory Reports equips you to spot and avoid fraudulent publishing outlets.

This section "Evaluating Journals: Quality" by UW Libraries was used under the license CC-BY-NC 4.0