Strategic publishing

What is a quality journal?

Assessing what is meant by journal quality often involves striking a balance between institutional imperatives and the push to ‘publish or perish’ versus considerations such as access by discipline peers and recognition in your respective field or industry influence.

Some factors to consider:

• Who is your audience – is it academic or industry?
• Is a particular journal relevant to your discipline and will it reach your desired target audience?
• What is the journal’s aim and scope?
• Have you evaluated the journal’s quality using traditional metrics such as journal impact factors and rankings?
• Can you determine the prestige of the editorial team and contributors and the journal circulation?
• Does the journal have an open access policy, particularly if output is from a nationally or internationally competitively funded project
  (e.g. Australian Research Council (ARC), National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), National Institutes of Health (NIH))
• Are there funding body requirements that you need to consider?

​​​​​​​Photo courtesy of Flickr user Wiley Asia

Watch:

Publishing Power Hour 1: Publishing in quality journals [00:46:58] (Curtin staff and students only)

Tools for finding quality journals

Useful resources are listed below:

How to maximise your chance of getting accepted

The following strategies are recommended to maximize your article’s likelihood of being accepted:

• Follow the publisher’s instructions to authors on the type of material they accept - many publishers will provide detailed information on their requirements and processes.
• Check the journal website for article acceptance rates. The acceptance rate for submissions can vary from 5% to 95%.
• Allow adequate preparation time as you may only be permitted to submit a document to one journal at any time. Allow time to rework or response to reviewers’ comments.
• Turnabout time is critical as it may be several months resulting in 1 to 2 years interval until publication. Therefore, it is important to check publishers’ advice to authors.
• Consider the frequency of publication of your journal. Does it fit into your timeframe?
• Think about writing for special issues or responding to calls for papers. (See Special issues or call for papers below.)

Watch:

Publishing Power Hour 6: Getting your article published [00:59:30] (Curtin staff and students only)

How to publish in Nature and Science: Workshop recording [01:19:20] - Faculty of Science and Engineering: Nature and Science Workshop 2021. Speakers in engineering, astronomy and life sciences provided case studies on how they were able to publish in Nature or Science.

Journal matching

Many publishers offer online automated tools that allow you to match the abstract of your paper with a suitable journal title in their publishing house. These emerging services use text matching and similarity, which may not be perfect, but they can often alert you to titles that you may otherwise not find. Below are some examples:

• Elsevier Journal Finder - matches abstracts using Elsevier journal titles using a range of filters to allow fine tuning of your search.
• Wiley Journal Finder - lacks the fine tuning of the Elsevier tool, using only the title and abstract of a paper with no other filters available.
• Springer Nature Journal Suggester - searches over 2500 Springer and BMC (BioMed Central) titles with a range of filters including minimum acceptance rates and open access options.
• EndNote ManuscriptMatcher - uses the manuscript title, abstract and references to suggest journal matches across the Web of Science database. Available from within EndNote.
• IEEE Publication Recommender - searches over journals and conferences in the IEEE digital library.
• Jane - Journal/Author Name Estimator - searches across the Pubmed database to find journals, authors or articles.

Special issues or call for papers

When publishers wish to put together a special issue on a particular topic, they often send out a call for papers. They are generally very explicit in what they require, and provide a detailed overview of formats, topics and contact points. This has the advantage of an academic having a clear understanding of what the publisher requires and is therefore able to focus the content accordingly.

Resources:

Some publishers provide a portal to all current “call for papers” and you can browse by topic. Examples include:

• Elsevier - Special issues
• Emerald - Calls for papers
• Karger- Call for papers
• SAGE - Open calls for papers
• Taylor & Francis - Calls for papers

Two Nature journals provide access to guest edited collections covering both the science and social science disciplines:

• Humanities & Social Sciences Communications - Calls for papers
• Scientific Reports - Calls for papers

Another way of finding a call for papers is by going to a journal’s homepage and checking if it has a call for papers tab. The journal may have a news section that will list any upcoming special issues.

You can then check if there are any current call for papers that you may want to submit to. This is particularly useful if you are targeting specific journals to publish with.

Note that this is not necessarily a feature of all journals.

Open access journals