Subject Guides: Research Impact: Publishing Strategy

Develop your publishing strategy

Your research impact can reflect your publishing strategy. Many factors deserve consideration when developing your publishing strategy, including:

When searching for literature on your research area, which journals publish relevant content? These may guide you to appropriate targets for your own publications.
Do the aims and scope of shortlisted journals confirm your paper will be a good fit?
Does the acceptance process include peer review?
Should you prioritise journals with an international editorial board?
Is there a suitable Open Access publishing option?
- Does the journal policy enable you to make a version of your paper openly accessible through the institutional Open Access Repository (OAR), to broaden its discoverability and readership?
- Is the journal included in a Read and Publish agreement, saving you article processing charges?
How important is quantitative measurement of your research impact likely to be? Can you find a journal Impact Factor (IF) or SciMago Journal Rank (SJR) measure? Is the journal on a list of recommended journals in your discipline? What do these measures indicate?
Consult with your supervisor, esteemed peers or senior researchers for their advice

Select journals to suit your aims

Sometimes discipline-specific lists of journals may be available, assisting in the process of identifying suitable target journals for publications. Where no appropriate journal list may be found, or to ascertain where a journal is indexed, refer to Ulrich's.

CWTS Journal Indicators
Free access to bibliometric indicators on scientific journals. The indicators have been calculated based on the 20,000 journals in the Scopus bibliographic database produced by Elsevier.
One key indicator is the Source Normalised Impact per Pape (SNIP) - www.journalindicators.com/indicators - which measures the average citation impact of the publications of a journal. SNIP corrects for differences in citation practices between scientific fields, thereby allowing for more accurate between-field comparisons of citation impact. CWTS Journal Indicators also provides stability intervals that indicate the reliability of the SNIP value of a journal.
ABDC Journal Quality List
The Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) established a list in 2007, originally for use in business schools. This has since been updated and journals are allocated to one of four categories of quality.
APSA Preferred Journals List
The Australasian Political Studies Association (APSA) has its own list of preferred journal rankings for the 1606 and 1605 FOR codes to be used in combination with other metric data for assessing research quality.
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
A community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.
Journal/Author Name Estimator (JANE)
Jane (Journal/Author Name Estimator) is a freely available web-based application that, on the basis of a sample text (e.g. the title and abstract of a manuscript), can suggest journals and experts who have published similar articles in medical fields. JANE provides help in determining which journal is most appropriate for publishing authors' results, and which other scientists can be called upon to review their work. All journals included in Medline are included in Jane, as well as All authors that have published one or more articles in the last 10 years that have been included in Medline.
Ulrich's Web
A source of detailed information on more than 300,000 serials, across more than 900 subject areas, including ISSN, publisher, language, subject, whether or not peer-reviewed, abstracting & indexing coverage, full-text database coverage, tables of contents, and reviews written by librarians.

Identify reputable publishers

With so many publications and publishers, how can you be sure you can trust a particular journal?

Follow this checklist to make sure you choose trusted journals for your research.

Think, Check, Submit

Predatory journals: What they are and how to avoid them
This article by Elmore & Weston (2020) is one of many that provide useful tips on evaluating the authenticity of publications. See Table 2 for some of these.

University of Tasmania, Australia

Research Impact

Develop your publishing strategy

Select journals to suit your aims

Identify reputable publishers