Scholarly publishing is the result of research from which scholarly writings are created. Scholarly publishing exists to:
Below are tools that not only measure journal impact but can also help inform on what journal to publish in based on discipline and the quality of the journal.
The journal impact factor (JIF) plays a role in decided where to publish peer-review articles; however, the selection of where to publish a monograph or book chapter is different. Below are some helpful resources in lieu of the JIF.
Web of Science (WoS) is a citation index to thousands of scholarly journals worldwide including open access journals, conference proceedings, and other materials. It can help faculty advance their research interests and academic publishing with access to journal analytics tools and current archives to the following core collections:
What's new? Access to preprint citations and records of dissertations & theses
Further Help: About Web of Science | Reference Guide PDF | Video Tutorials
By creating a free profile on Web of Science through the library, you will have full entitlements to view all publications and metrics and to use the platform for tracking and promoting your scholarly contributions, such as journal and review articles. Here's how to register:
Help Guides: Metrics | Researcher Profiles | Quick Reference PDF
Click "Analyze Results" when doing a search by topic to identify journals that publish the highest number of papers on topics of interest.
JCR is a research analytics tool on the InCites platform and integrated with the Web of Science. It measures the citation performance of journals to help you make informed publication decisions in your field of study:
Further Help: About Journal Citation Reports | User Guide PDF
JCR produces journal rankings based on quantitative analysis with metrics. Journal-level metrics help to provide a more detailed view of a journal's impact within its field.
Journal Impact Factor (JIF):
Journal Citation Indicator (JCI):
A feature in JCR to help identify quality journals indexed in Web of Science that publish articles on topics related to your manuscript.
You can use JCR to find journals in a particular research area by category and publisher information from different countries and regions. Use top menu to search by Journals, Categories, Publishers and Countries/Regions, or the filter panel in JCR to limit your search.
Learn more about Open Access: OA in Journal Citation Reports | Quick Reference PDF
Uncover top performing and highly cited papers, authors, institutions, countries & journals in varied disciplines based on citation levels:
Help Guides: Overview | Quick Reference PDF
Scimago captures similar metrics and includes more journals that are indexed in JCR. If you are unable to find a particular journal in JCR, you’ll likely find it in Scimago. On the journal’s page in Scimago, you’ll notice that the H-Index is the main metric listed. You are free to grab that metric, or you can look at the H5-Index in Google Scholar.
The metric most interested in from Scimago is the Scientific Journal Ranking (SJR). To find this, you’ll want to scroll way down the page, until you see the boxes with all of the graphs. The first one is SJR. You can toggle the box from the graph to a chart that will list the SJR numbers by year. The most current year will appear at the bottom. To find the quartiles in Scimago, you’ll then want to scroll back up a bit to find the Quartiles section. You can toggle this one as well to get the list of quartiles for each category. While some of the categories may be the same as the ones in JCR, they will likely be a bit different. These are based on JCR and Scimago’s categories, not those determined by the journal itself.
Usually, an article record in Google Scholar or the Web of Science will provide a link to the article on the publisher’s site, but you can also do a web search or use the DOI to find it.
There are two pieces of information on the publisher’s website to find: the Altmetric score, and usage data, like views and downloads. Sometimes the publisher will include the Altmetric score with other article metrics, but so long as there is a DOI on the page, you should be able to look it up using the bookmarklet tool. In this case, both usage data and the Altmetric score are listed:
However, since this publisher provides a separate tab of metrics data, it is always a good idea to check to see what information is collected there. In some cases, it may be more granular than what appears on the article’s landing page.
Altmetric bookmarklet tool, which is an internet browser add-on that uses an article’s DOI to find the associated Altmetric record. Once the tool has been installed, clicking the button will generate a small window with the Altmetric score in the upper-right of your browser.
Clicking on the window will bring you to the full details about the different facets that contribute to the full Altmetric score.
The JournalGuide is a free database of journals that allows you to "Search, filter, sort, and compare journals from more than 46,000 titles". Their goal is to "...is to bring all sources of data together in one place to give authors a simple way to choose the best journal for their research". You may search using your manuscript title, keywords from the title, journal name, publisher, or category/subcategory. Includes open access journals and impact factors when available.
"SAGE Path is a free article transfer service that helps authors find the right journal for their manuscript. We give authors the ability to search and refine journals according to their preferences using our Journal Recommender. Once the manuscript has been paired with appropriate journals, SAGE Path offers transfer links for smooth and easy submission."
IEEE Publication Recommender "Find the best match for your scholarly article" Also searches for conferences.
Directory of Open Access Journals "DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. All DOAJ services are free of charge including being indexed. All data is freely available."
Open Access journals serve as an alternative to commercial publishers. Most have no publication fees and are peer-reviewed before being accepted and final publication. A In addition they allow authors to upload copies to their institutional repository.
