PhD Skill: Find journal to publish in

Summary: Sharing the outcome of your research work is essential for researchers. Publishing in journals is very rewarding, but also demanding. Finding the right journal avoids the risk that you invest a lot of time and effort for the wrong output journal. Here are a couple of ways how to find that "ideal" journal.

Steps:

1. Which journals do you read the most?
2. Which journals does your supervisor recommend?
3. Search for potential journals in Scimago and EAAE Architectural Periodicals Database.
4. Find articles from those journals.
5. Make your choice.

In principle, it should not be too hard to answer the question, what journal you should target for your publications. If you are already progressed in your research, you must have a good overview of state-of-the-art research on your topic. Then the best journals are those that you refer to the most.

The second important resource is your supervisor, who can tell you which journal to target.

Depending where you are in your research, there are basically two kinds of papers that you can consider, which are suitable for publication in a journal:

(1) First half of your research track: review paper that systematically and rigorously investigates, categorizes, and summarizes a special topic in research.

(2) Second half of your research track: research results of your work, including method, results, and detailed discussion of the work.

If you have no substantial work that falls in either category, you should consider rather to go to a conference, which is very helpful for widening your network, getting to know the research, and feedback on your work in progress (check this article on your output possibilities throughout your research).

Journal criteria

What are the factors to look for in a journal?

1. The right audience: who is reading the journal? Getting published in an outstanding journal is great of course, but if no one from your peers reads that journal, the effect will be zero - for two main reasons: (1) your work will go unnoticed because for the readers of the journal it is outside their topic of interest and you miss your peers, and thus (2) people will not cite your work.
2. Impact of the journal: how much do other people refer to the journal in their own publications? This is usually expressed by the so-called Impact factor, or in which Quartile the journal falls. It is important to know, that these factors are not an objectively scientific measure valid for all journals. The reason is, that the Impact factor (a single number) is calculated by the company Clarivate, depending on their database, and the Quartile (Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4) is calculated by Scimago, that draws from the Scopus database. Each of these databases has their own selection of journals; thus, many journals are left out.
3. Open Access or not: with Open Access (OA), published papers are available (mostly digitally) for all, where journals that are not OA, require subscriptions from individuals, universities, or libraries before you can get the publications.

Concerning (1): Personally, I would prefer the journal that my peers read above a perhaps higher-ranking but out of focus journal. However, the choice here really is yours.

Concerning (2): The impact factor and/or quartile of the journal becomes especially a decisive factor later in your career, for example when you aim for tenure. Evaluation committees usually put greater emphasis or value on higher impacted journals, simply because they do not use other metrics to assess your academic performance. At the start of your research career, all that really matters is the Q1-Q4 indicator (Q1: journal in the top 25%; Q2: journal in the top 25-50%; etc). You can safely assume, that the level of difficulty getting accepted in a Q1 journal is much higher than for a Q2 journal; which in turn is higher than for a Q3 journal; and that one higher than for a Q4 journal.

Especially when you have never published in a journal before, getting into any journal should be your priority. You will build up your skills in scientific communication as you go, and thus the level of journals to which you submit your work will also rise in time.

Concerning (3): OA journals are sometimes perceived as less-important than journals which are behind a pay-wall. Personally, I would target OA-journals first, for the simple reason that many more people will have a chance to become acquainted with your work. Also consider that if your work is supported with government grants, there can be the explicit requirement that you should publish in OA-journals.

Some useful resources

There are two very useful resources that are easily accessible for PhD researchers searching for journals: (1) The Scimago Journal & Country Rank; and (2) the EAAE Architectural Periodicals database. The Scimago database contains journals from many fields of science, not just architecture. The EAAE database contains journals from architecture.

Scimago Journal & Country Rank

The online page can be found here: Scimago Journal & Country Rank.

This online database counts at the time of writing information about 27955 journals (20 Oct 2023). You can limit the search by selecting at the top Subject Area Engineering (limits to 3110 journals) and Subject Category Architecture (limits to 156 journals). Another option is to fill in the top-right corner of the page the title of the journal or ISSN number. If you do not know the title of a journal, you can also simply enter the words for the topics that the journal should cover (very often the title of the journal closely matches its content). In a list I published in 2018, there are 276 journals from Scimago.

Let's say you went through the option Engineering/Architecture. The first hits will show the following journals (result dd 20 October 2023):

• Developments in the Built Environment.
• Journal of Building Engineering.
• Design Studies.
• Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and Architectural Management.

Some things to notice: (1) The journal Developments in the Built Environment is Open Access (the icon directly under the journal name). (2) All first listed journals are Q1 journals. (3) There are big differences in the following numbers like H index, Total docs (2022), Total docs (3 years), etc. To understand these numbers, you need to know more about the journals. For example, Developments in the Built Environment is the youngest journal (covered 2020-2022), followed by Journal of Building Engineering (2015-2022), and the oldest, Design Studies (1979-2022), Environment and Planning B (2017-2022). This is reflected in the H-index - the higher number indicates a larger amount of people tracking that journal and thus citing to articles from those journals.

Let's click on Design Studies, which brings you to the more detailed overview of this journal. What you should take particular attention to, is listed near the end of the page. Scroll down until you find the coloured table called Quartiles:

You will quickly see that the main topic areas covered in Design Studies are Architecture, Artificial Intelligence, Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous), Computer Science Applications, Engineering (miscellaneous), and Social Sciences (misscellaneous) followed by a timeline and coloured cells. When you hover the mouse over a cell, it will indicate in which quartile Q1-Q4 the journals falls in that year on that category. Thus, it is safe to conclude that Design Studies is a top journal for research on Architecture (Q1 from 1999 - 2022).

EAAE Architectural Periodicals Database

The online page can be found here: https://eaae.tadabase.io/architectural-periodicals-db#!/welcome-page.

To use this database, you need to sign up (it is for free). The database is supported by the European Association for Architectural Education (EAAE). It is created and maintained by Débora Domingo Calabuig, from the Universitat Politècnica de València.

To date (October 2023), the database has 788 journals on architecture. You can search on name, but also filter on aspects such as language(s), Open Access or not, and in which databases it is indexed. There is no ranking as in the Scimago database, simply because this information is not available. Note however, that the amount of journals for architecture is much larger than in the Scimago database.

For a broad search on potential journals, you can start with the EAAE Architectural Periodicals Database, and when you have found one or more interesting journals, you can check in the Scimago database if they are listed there. For the listed ones, you can get information about their relative importance or quality. For the ones that are not listed in Scimago, it does not mean that they are of lesser quality - it simply means they are not listed. To determine their quality, you need to do a bit of reading in their published articles.

So I found some journals, what's next?

The best way to learn if a journal is suitable for you, is to read a number of articles that are published in that journal. Most journals have a search function available for articles. For a general impression, simply go through the most recent volumes (say, 1-3 years) and take articles that strike your interest. You can also search using keywords taken from your own research to find articles close to your own work.

Do not be a stranger to your library! Yes, many things can be accessed through the Internet, but most likely your institution library has many journals available.

If the library at your institution has a subscription for the journals you are interested in, then you are lucky and can easily access those articles. Alternatively, your library may have a subscription to online databases with journal content. Here I list the ones I use the most, or of which I have knowledge:

1. Science Direct. Advantage: very large database of articles, many of which are accessible full text. Disadvantage: you need a paid subscription to access it. Link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/ (Oct 2023).
2. ACM Digital Library: Mostly for computer-oriented content. Link: https://dl.acm.org/ (Oct 2023).
3. Springer Link: Books and journals published by Springer. Subscription required. Link: https://link.springer.com/ (Oct 2023).
4. CORE: Database of Open Access papers. Link: https://core.ac.uk/ (Oct 2023).
5. DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals. Link: https://doaj.org/ (Oct 2023).

And if this does not work....

If your search through all of these resources does not yield results, you can always include Google Scholar. Link: https://scholar.google.com/ (Oct 2023). As the name suggests, this search engine builds on the Google search engine to find for you researchers and their publications. If somehow available, in the search results will be links to full-text versions of the papers.

If you have not done already, you can register on Google scholar, and it will create your research profile and find for example citations of your work.

Ask the authors

Another, very straightforward option, is to reach out to the authors of the articles you want to read but cannot access, and ask if they can send you their paper.

Select your journal

Now that you have a well-founded overview of your potential journals, make your choice which one to target. Apart from the criteria at the start of this article, ask yourself:

1. Do I have enough substantial material to warrant a paper in this journal?
2. Does the content of my research work fit with the content of the journal?

Enjoy your search for journals, and good luck with your publications. I hope this is helpful for you.