What is a high-quality journal?: How to Publish in High Quality Scientific Journals: 101 Hints and Tips (#0004)

This article is an extract from the above book. See the end of the article for more information.

It is not good enough to just publish, but you need to publish in high quality journals (see point 19). For many, the term high quality equates to publishing in journals that are listed on Thomson Reuter’s Web of Science (https://bit.ly/2DeeQhF) database or Elsevier’s Scopus (https://bit.ly/2AZzqAZ) database. You should note that these are subscription only services and most people will do that through an institutional subscription. The way you access these services will vary from institution to institution, so you might want to check with your library or your colleagues.

Using Web of Science or Scopus as a working hypothesis for deciding if a journal is high quality is probably not a bad definition to use. Not because these journals are necessarily the best journals but because many people believe that this is the case. Indeed, many institutions will insist, or at least highly encourage, their academics to only publish in Web of Science journals, some even saying that their staff should only target Q1 and Q2 journals (see point 40).

To actually define what is a high-quality journal is not easy as there is no single, widely accepted, definition, so you have to decide what you believe makes a journal high quality, but your definition must be made in the context of what others will think when they look at your CV or your web site. Ultimately, it is not you who decides, but promotion panels, grant funding agencies and interview panels. You must put yourselves in their shoes.

My working definition is as follows:

“I choose to target Web of Science (ISI) journals as most observers, in my disciplines, will consider these amongst the best quality journals. If I submit to a journal that is not listed by Web of Science I need a good reason to do so. These reasons might that I have exhausted the Web of Science journals that I have targeted or the journal is not yet listed by Web of Science but I believe that it will do so in the future.”

A couple of caveats. It does take me a while to exhaust the list of potential Web of Science journals as, when I write an article, I will typically have 5-6 journals that I will target before I submit to a journal that is not listed by Web of Science. If the paper gets rejected and I have exhausted my list of Web of Science journals, I will then look at Scopus journals. To be honest this hardly ever happens as I will improve the article based on feedback received so by the time I am far enough down the Web of Science list I would hope that the paper has been improved enough to get it accepted.

I sometimes target journals that are not yet listed by Web of Science, but I believe that the journal will be listed as soon as it meets their criteria. These are typically journals, from reputable publishers, who have most (if not all) of their journals listed in Web of Science so it is a reasonable expectation that they will try and get their new journal listed. This will not work for everybody, but I have got to a stage in my career where I can wait for a journal to be listed by Web of Science. Other researchers may not have that luxury.

You should have some rationale that helps you decide which journals you target, otherwise you will just be randomly choosing journals with, potentially, a different strategy for every paper that you write.

It is worth talking to others, asking them how they choose which journals they submit to. Everybody’s strategy will be slightly different, and you should draw on best practices, taking into account the viewpoint of your peers, where you are in your career and your own aims and objectives.

You can see the previous article here. You can see the next article here.

There is a Table of Contents for this series of articles here.

Book

This series of articles are extracts from the above book. I aim to publish an article each week. Over time, I will publish most of the book on LinkedIn. To get through the entire book is likely to take about 70 weeks.

More information about this series of articles is given in the brief introduction before we started publishing material from the book.

If you are interested in finding more about the book, take a look at its homepage.

If you want to order the Kindle version of the book from Amazon, take a look at this page.

About me

LinkedIn: https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/grahamkendall1/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Graham_Kendall

Web site: https://www.graham-kendall.com