Choosing a journal expired

There are many factors that play a role in choosing the right journal to publish your valued research results. The scope of the journal, the reputation of the editors, the acceptance ratio, the average speed from time of submission to final publication, journal circulation and visibility whether or not in open access are all factors that should be considered when choosing a journal.

One factor that still plays an important role is the Journal Impact Factor (JIF). The JIF's are published yearly in the Journal Citation Reports by Thomson Reuters Scientific. Although disputed a lot, they can be helpful in selecting a good journal for publishing your research. The top 25% of the journals in a subject category, the so called Q1 journals, also play an important role in the tenure track at Wageningen University.

Research by the Spanish Scimago group has shown that institutions with a high percentage of Q1 articles also show a good article impact (Relative Impact or RI). In the graph below Wageningen in red is shown among some 3000 universities worldwide.

publish graph.jpg

From the graph it appears that we still can select better journals to submit our articles, with the aim to achieve a better article impact.

Moreover Canadian research has show that the journal in which papers are published have a strong influence on their citation rates, as duplicate papers published in high-impact journals obtain, on average, twice as many citations as their identical counterparts published in journals with lower impact factors (Larivière & Gingras, 2010).

References

  • Klingner, J.K., D. Scanlon & M. Pressley (2005). How to Publish in Scholarly Journals. Educational Researcher, 34(8): 14-20 http://dx.doi.org/10.3102/0013189x034008014
  • Larivière, V. and Y. Gingras (2010). The impact factor's Matthew Effect: A natural experiment in bibliometrics. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 61(2): 424-427. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/asi.21232
  • Scimago Institutions Ranking (2012). SIR World Report 2012, Scimago. 98p. www.scimagoir.com.