How to select a suitable journal for your paper?
Researchers choose to publish their research findings for various reasons: to validate their research, to increase the researcher’s credibility, to meet the requirements of recruitment, promotions, or grant applications, to name just a few. For those early career researchers, the most intractable question is: How to select a suitable journal for your paper?
There are two main factors to consider when choosing a journal: journal’s scope and journal’s reputation. To ensure your paper fits within the journal’s scope, you need to read the journal’s aims and scope, audience and reach, and author guidelines carefully. The reputation is based on a few aspects such as the reputation of the editorial team, the peer-review process, turnaround times, acceptance rate, and, of course journal metrics such as Journal Impact Factor.
As most Singapore research funding agencies require publications to be made open access within 1 year from publication date, do check the publisher's archiving policy for embargo setting before selecting the journal, you may perform your check through Sherpa Romeo.
A. Journal Metrics
Here is an introduction to a few commonly used journal metrics for journal evaluation.
1. Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is a commonly used metric to evaluate journals via Journal Citation Reports (JCR), which is based on Web of Science database. It provides a functional approximation of the mean citation rate per citable item. If Journal A has an impact factor of 5, on average, the articles published in Journal A within the last 2 years have been cited 5 times. As such, a journal would aim to work towards as high an impact factor as it could.
Even though impact factor has been commonly used to evaluate journals, it also has a few cons, for example, it does not account for positive or negative citation, it is bound to the contents of the Web of Science database only.
a. How to find a Journal’s Impact Factor (JIF) in JCR
To find a journal’s impact factor in JCR, you can follow the few steps below:
i. When you are in the Journal Citation Reports database page, search a journal by keying in the journal title as shown in Fig. 1.
Fig. 1: Search JCR by entering a journal title
ii. You will get the journal’s citation report as shown in Fig. 2 below. You can see how the JIF was calculated as highlighted in the red box.
Fig. 2: Journal citation activities and impact factor
iii. Or you can click “Browse by Journal” to get the list of journal titles ranked by Journal Impact Factor as shown in Fig. 3, with each journal’s impact factor and Eigenfactor Score presented in the red box below.
Fig. 3: List of journals ranked by impact factor and Eigenfactor
iv. Click on the individual title to view the journal citation report including other influence metrics such as Article Influence Score and Normalized Eigenfactor as shown in Fig. 4.
Fig. 4: Other metrics such as Article Influence Score and Normalized Eigenfactor
b. Relative analysis of JIF in a discipline
There is a common argument that choosing a journal based only on its JIF is not the best way to go. In some core subject areas, where the number of researchers is low, JIF will also be low. It is therefore important to note that when evaluating journals, the impact factors of journals should not be compared across different disciplines. To do a relative analysis of JIF in a special subject area, you can do it using JCR as below:
i. From JCR homepage, select “browse by category”, the “Categories by Rank” page is shown in Fig. 5, all journal categories are ranked by number of journals. You can select a specific category by following steps 1 and 2. The result will be shown in Fig. 6.
Fig. 5: Steps to browse journals by category
ii. In the specific category page, you will get a few indicators of this category, such as the median impact factor and the aggregate impact factor. You can click the category name to see the details.
Fig. 6: Broad indicators for the selected category
iii. In the individual category page as in Fig. 7, you will see the number of journals under the “Cell Biology” category by year, and other indicators such as median impact factor by year, which will help you understand the “middle” impact factor of indexed journals in this field in this year. You can use this indicator to orient your selected journal in relation to the field.
Fig. 7: Individual category page
iv. Clicking on the number under “# Journals” will bring you to the list of journals under this category in a specific year as shown in Fig. 8. The list will also show the individual Journal Impact Factor. For example, the journal Cancer Cell’s JIF is 23.916 as highlighted in the box. Comparing with the median impact factor of 3.485 in this category, you will be able to tell where your targeted journal is in this field, and whether it is suitable for your paper or not. Or you can also use the list to shortlist the journals you want to send your paper to. To know more about this journal, you can click the journal title to view the full journal profile.
Fig. 8: Individual journal impact factor listing by category
2. CiteScore
Introduced in 2016, CiteScore platform is a free tool based on data from Scopus for more than 22,000 journal titles. CiteScore is the number of citations received by a journal in one year to documents published in the three previous years, divided by the number of documents (articles, reviews, conference papers, book chapters and data papers) indexed in Scopus published in those same four years.
The major differences between CiteScore and Journal Impact Factor are:
i. Scopus data is used to calculate CiteScore, while Web of Science data is used for Impact Factor calculation.
ii. CiteScore uses a 4-year window while Impact Factor adopts a 2-year window.
iii. CiteScore includes all document types indexed by Scopus, including reviews, conference papers, articles, notes, letters, editorials, etc. In the case of Impact Factor, only "citable documents", which are articles and reviews are selected.
3. SCImago Journal Rank (SJR)
SCImago is a publicly available portal for journals and country scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus database. SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) measures the scholarly influence of a journal by accounting for the number of citations as well as the prestige of the citing journals. SJR is based on the eigenvector centrality measure used in network theory. It is a size-independent measure that ranks journals based on their average prestige per article.
B. Tools for Journal Selection
There are a number of tools available to help researchers choose a suitable journal. The types of tools available vary, some help with initial shortlisting while others provide data points you would need to consider your choice of journal such as quality of peer-review process, acceptance rates etc.
Check out these tools to get suggestions on journals to submit your article. Most of them require a combination of information related to the journal article in order to suggest a suitable journal. Some of the usual information required include title of paper, abstract, keywords, subject area etc.
C. Recommended Readings
Selecting the right journal for your submission
How to Select a Journal to Submit and Publish Your Biomedical Paper?
Audience Matters: A study of how authors select educational journals
Bibliometrics: tracking research impact by selecting the appropriate metrics