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One of the trickiest issues in academic publishing is selecting a suitable journal for your research. Sadly, this step is all too often left until the very end of the process: the work is done, field data collected (perhaps), experiments conducted (perhaps), analysis performed and the research is all written up for publication. But now, the important question looms: where to send the paper?

We’ve recently seen an upsurge in the number of academic conferences. However, are you sure that the conference you plan to attend is really all that it appears to be?

Selecting a target journal for research work is one of the toughest initial steps of the publishing process. This article discusses steps to select the right journal and also explains mirror journals.

Academic research articles are published following one of two basic models, either ‘traditional’ or open access (OA). Authors are usually charged an article processing charge (APC) in the OA model and then usually paid personally at the institutional level, or from research grants (the industry-preferred model).

Researchers around the world all want the same things: To publish as many papers as possible, in the best journals possible, as quickly as possible.

Selecting a journal to submit your newly written research paper to can seem like an overwhelming decision – but it doesn’t have to be! Here, we will talk about a variety of factors that may influence your journal selection, so that you can feel more confident about your decision.

The Science Citation Index (now the Science Citation Index Expanded, or SCIE) is one of the core databases included in the products Web of Knowledge and Web of Science, owned by Clarivate. This was formerly owned by Thomson Reuters, who were acquired by Clarivate in 2016.

The cost-to-publish open access model has sadly led to a dramatic rise in predatory publishers running predatory journals. They are journals that are only interested in taking your money. 

Choosing an appropriate journal for your paper is a very important process in your research publication journey and worth your time and effort. If you submit your article to a journal that is not a good fit it will likely be sent back to you and often without any peer review. 

When you submit your paper to a journal for consideration, you want to be sure that the journal follows the appropriate ethical guidelines. You want to know that the editors will act in an ethical way, that the peer review process follows appropriate standards, and that the journal has integrity.

A preprint is an article that has been published prior to peer review, typically on a preprint server. As you may guess, the authors are likely to want to publish the same work in a more traditional format in a peer-reviewed journal. This raises the question of what happens to the preprint once a definitive version of the manuscript is accepted by a traditional journal.

Two of the most well-known and widely used journal quality metrics are the impact factor and the h-index. How do you decide which of these metrics to rely on when choosing a journal? The first step is understanding what each of these metrics is and what it tells you about the journal.

According to Clarivate, 28 different criteria are used to evaluate journals and decide whether they will be included in the ESCI or the SCIE. Overall, 24 of these criteria relate to quality, while the remaining four relate to impact. Journals that meet the quality criteria are included in the ESCI, whereas journals that meet both the quality criteria and the impact criteria are listed in the SCIE.

Generally speaking, to determine which journals in your field are considered top journals, you should look at the distribution of scores for all journals in the field (whether by impact factor, h-index, or some other metric). This will give you an idea of how the journals within a field compare to one another.

Researchers aim to publish in top-tier and high-ranking journals. So it is important for them to know how a journal is classified and ranked. This helps them when choosing a journal to which they will submit their work.

As scholarship has moved online and Open Access has gathered momentum, there is growing consensus that alternative metrics are needed. A variety of research metrics are currently used, and the number of different metrics is growing every day.

As an author of research papers, targeting the right journal is very important. One of the best ways to determine the best journal for your work is to understand the scope (also known as aim or focus) of scientific journals.

In this webinar, our panel discusses how to deal with a predatory publisher and shares tips for how you can avoid submitting to a predatory journal.

The impact factor (IF) is a number, a metric, a ‘way to keep score’ that is based upon the number of citations that articles published in a journal receive over a specific time. This article discusses the benefits and disadvantages of this metric.

The ‘impact’ of a piece of research is difficult to quantify. For that reason, researchers often turn to the impact factor (IF) of journals within which they are published. Unfortunately, there has been an unhealthy overreliance on IFs in the academic space, which calls to question whether this is a useful metric, and is prompting researchers to rethink their take on ‘impact’.