Journal selection
Below are:
- journal selection tools
- a note about predatory outlets.
01. Journal selection tools
Finding the right journal is a tricky task. There are a lot of metrics and data, and it can be quite intimidating to work through the process of identifying an outlet for your work. If your institution doesn’t provide specific publication outlets or publishers, then you need some sort of means to work out whether you should publish somewhere.
ScimagoJR [↗]
-- journals -- rankings --
Scimago is a good tool for finding and valuing journals, to an extent. The service works by classifying each journal into relevant areas of research and then allocating a quartile (i.e. Q1-Q4). Q1 is higher ranked than Q4. Yes, Q1 is usually presitigious, but also may not be worth the effort for publishing, as the audience for your work may not be there by the time your work is published. Equally, a Q4 journal isn’t a ‘bad’ journal - it’s just less visible, more niche, or ‘emerging’ in some capacity.
My main warning with ScimagoJR is that it can direct people towards highly quantitative approaches to publishing, which I think is a generally bad idea. Instead, think about each journal as an audience or topic, and write to your audience as a collection of scholars who think in the topic area.
At least within the humanities and social sciences in Australia it has become a defacto ranking tool for identifying the value of a particular journal, and thus for ranking the value of academic contributions across multiple disciplines.
Importantly, all journals on Scimago are indexed by academic journal databases (mostly Scopus), which means that they are - to some extent - confirmed to be a ‘real’ journal. If something’s not listed, then it is maybe predatory (see below) or non-academic.
Open Policy Finder [↗]
-- journals -- open access --
The Open Policy Finder (nee Sherpa Romeo) is a good resource for finding open access publishers. Open Access is important, and this database is useful for helping you to determine the requirements of different journals and publishers.
Directory of Open Access Journals [↗]
-- journals -- open access --
A useful resource for assessing the nature of open access publications. It gives you some information about any fees, publication times, and a brief history of the journal.
02. Predatory outlets
Predatory publishers exist purely to suck money out of academics, and don’t give back a ‘quality’ publication. i.e. a publication that is going to be easily circulated to other academics through existing library agreements. Predatory publishers often preying on academics who are just starting (such as students), academics who are desperate, or academics who are seeking an academic publication in another language. Depending on your institution, this may be embarassing, bad, or otherwise, and certainly you may find yourself signing away rights to your work and having to pay to have it published. Avoid them at all costs.
Beall’s list [↗]
-- predatory publishers --
Beall’s list is a list of publishers and journals that are deemed to be predatory by Jeffrey Beall. His list is perhaps more useful as a warning, rather than as an up-to-date list of which journals are predatory. You’re going to need to think about your publication outlets using more than just his list. I’d also note that there are a small number of publications on his lists that are ‘okay’, but Beall’s categories are fairly strict and absolutist, meaning that some things maybe don’t need to be on the list. That’s fine for you, though, because your publication is going to be guided by your research narrative, and not metrics, right?