You might often feel intense pressure for your research to be published in high ranking journals. This is a quick summary of what you could keep in mind when approaching journals. If you know the editor of a journal, the process might be more streamlined for you. You also might prefer to look for a more independently managed (or owned) journal.
How do you choose a journal?
Here are some tips from Elsevier. These will be similar to the procedures for other major journal producers. There is also a link to an author’s update which is described as a place to find new trends in research and tips for how to get published. I found most articles here were about neither. One insightful article was about what to do when a journal rejects your article.
The journal finder tool identifies Elsevier journals that most closely match your article. You can insert any combination of your abstract, keywords, aims, scope or article title up to 5,000 characters. A list of relevant journals is generated, with the option for open access and its cost, journal metrics, acceptance rate, review time and production time.
Another helpful article at Elsevier’s author’s update area is about alternatives to printing in a top tier journal. It is interesting how journals become recognised as Grade A or not. It is also too complicated here to cover the subject extensively, which indicates that the process is not straightforward.
What lies behind impact metrics?
The table below comes from Wiley’s information. The “JCR Year” refers to the journal citation report year: the individual year for which a metric is provided.
| Metric Name | Metric Source | Metric Description |
| Journal Impact Factor | Clarivate – Web of Science | The Journal Impact Factor is defined as all citations to the journal in the current JCR year to items published in the previous two years, divided by the total number of scholarly items (these comprise articles, reviews, and proceedings papers) published in the journal in the previous two years. Learn more about Journal Impact Factor here. |
| 5-Year Journal Impact Factor | Clarivate – Web of Science | The 5-year journal Impact Factor is the average number of times articles from the journal published in the past five years have been cited in the JCR year. It is calculated by dividing the number of citations in the JCR year by the total number of articles published in the five previous years. Learn more about 5-Year Journal Impact Factor here. |
| Journal Citation Indicator | Clarivate – Web of Science | Designed to complement the Journal Impact Factor, the Journal Citation Indicator is field-normalized so it can be easily interpreted and compared across different disciplines. Learn more about Journal Citation Indicator here. |
| Altmetric Badge | Digital Science | Altmetrics go beyond more traditional citation metrics to measure social visibility around scientific articles. These metrics are based on a broad spectrum of indicators, such as tweets, blog mentions, news media, social bookmarking, article views, and downloads. |
| CiteScore | Scopus | The CiteScore is calculated by dividing the number of citations to documents published in a 4-year period by the number of documents in same 4-year period. Learn more about CiteScore here. |
| SNIP | Scopus | The Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) measures average citations in Year X to papers published in the previous 3 years. Citations are weighted by the citation potential of the journal’s subject category, thereby making the metric more comparable across different disciplines. |
| Scite Citation Badge | scite | Smart Citations allow users to see how a publication has been cited by providing the context of the citation and a classification describing whether it provides supporting or contrasting evidence for the cited claim. Learn more about scite Smart Citations here. |
As you can see, there is no clear way to assess the number of citations. This metric is a quantitative way to assess the impact of an article.