Once you have identified a few potential journals to publish your work in, the next step is to assess the quality and suitability of those journals. This will help you to target reputable, high-quality journals and ensure your article reaches your target audience. With such an abundance of journals to choose from, when considering where to publish it is necessary to assess:
When deciding on an appropriate outlet for your article, you will need to consider the aim, scope and audience of the potential journals you’ve identified. The aim and scope of a journal cover why the journal exists, what it intends to achieve and who the journal is for, and most journals will list the aim and scope on the journal website.
To be accepted for publication, your article must be aligned with the aim and scope of the journal. When reading the journal’s aim and scope, look for clues in the language about the types of articles the journal publishes. This may include things like subject scope, style of research accepted, geographical scope or audience.
Additionally, at this point you may need to consider whether your article can be published open access in the potential journals, to comply with funder mandates or to increase the discoverability of your research.
A journal’s quality indicators, including ranking and impact factors, are quantitative measures that attempt to estimate the importance and performance of a journal in a particular field.
Web of Science and Scopus are the two main sources of metrics for journal quality indicators.
Using Web of Science data, the JIF measures the average article citation frequency over a two-year period, and this measure is used to rank journals within subject categories.
Using Scopus data, the CiteScore shows the average article citation frequency over a three-year period, and this measure is used to rank journals within subject categories.
Using Scopus data, the SJR is calculated with an algorithm where citations are weighted, based on the prestige of the journal they come from.
Using Scopus data, the SNIP normalises for citation differences between fields, with an algorithm that gives a higher value to citations in fields where citations occur less often.
Many disciplines have created their own set of quality indicators:
While building your publishing track record it is important to be aware of predatory publishing practices in academic publishing and conferences. UOW's Predatory Publishing Guideline provides a set of publication quality indicators to refer to if you receive an unsolicited email from a publisher.
Use these tools to help you make informed decisions about where you publish your research:
When deciding where to publish, you should consider your target audience. While an academic audience will likely have access to your work via their institution's library, a community-based or practitioner audience is unlikely to have the same level of access to subscription content.
In addition to enabling community members and practitioners to access your work, the potential benefits of open access include more exposure for your work and compliance with funder mandates.
There are many paths to open access publishing, such as the open access publishing (Read & Publish) agreements, UOW's OA-HI grant (UOW staff intranet), paying to publish or adding your publications to an appropriate repository.
When selecting an outlet for your article you will need to consider the time to review and acceptance rate of the potential journals. Some journals may have a long timeframe between submission and publication, and some journals may have low acceptance rates for manuscripts, this may affect your ability to meet your specific publishing milestones.
There are some resources available to help you to determine time to review and acceptance rates of the journals you are considering, including:
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