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Research Toolkit: Strategic Publishing

This Guide feeds page links into the Research Toolkit on the library website

Where to Publish?

Thinking strategically about where to publish is an important step in raising the visibility and impact of your research.

As part of your literature review you would have identified the key articles and journals relevant to your research topic. Using tools such as SciMago, you can analyze the journal's citation data to give you an indication of the quality and reach of the journal. Analyzing the citation patterns of particular articles (you can use Google Scholar) can also indicate where the researchers in your field are publishing and what/where they are reading.

Once you have narrowed down your choice of journals to 3 or 4, make sure those journals are 'discoverable'. Check to see if the journals are indexed in the major databases such as Medline, Pubmed, and CINAHL . Also ensure that, if you are not publishing in an open access journal, that at least the table of contents for your journal is discoverable online via search engines such as Google and that the journal is discoverable in Google Scholar.

Questions to ask yourself: 

  • What impact would you like your research to have?
  • Who are the key researchers in your field, both individuals and institutions?
  • Where are the researchers in your field publishing their own work?
  • What do the researchers in your field read?

Come and see us in the Library and our expert librarians can help you publish in journals where your work can gain the most visibility and have the most impact.

Choose your Journal

Scimago allows you to compare journals or analyze journals separately using citation data. This data is drawn from the Scopus database which indexes over 21,500 journal titles from approximately 5,000 international publishers.

Just enter the title and/or abstract of the paper in the box, and click on 'Find journals', 'Find authors' or 'Find Articles'. Jane will then compare your document to millions of documents in Medline to find the best matching journals, authors or articles.

This Beta tool will assist you to find a Wiley Journal that may be relevant for your research. Just enter your title and abstract and let this tool recommend a journal to publish in.

A free tool from Carl Bergstrom’s lab at the University of Washington, Eigenfactor.com uses novel methods for evaluating the influence of scholarly periodicals and for mapping the structure of academic research. Data provided by Thomson Reuters (JCR).

Good list of questions to ask yourself when deciding which journal to publish in.

JOURNAL IMPACT FACTORS

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 or period. (Clarivate Analytic Impact Factor)

Citations to articles in the last two years / Articles published in the last two years = Impact Factor

Predatory Publishers

Predatory Publishers are those that readily accept articles  for publication without ever conducting peer review or quality checks to ensure research is ethical and original. Be wary of any publishers listed in Beall's List