When your research is ready for publication, consider choosing a journal which will maximise the impact of your research. Tools such as Journal Citation Reports help you to identify the journal’s impact factor and its quartile ranking.
While these indicators are important aids to identifying a journal, it is also necessary to check out the scope of the journal, the publisher's terms and conditions, and to consult with colleagues regarding their publishing expertise. If you're not familiar with a particular journal and want to check that it is genuine and trustworthy, sites such as Think Check Submit can help.
Elsevier have produced a guide to help researchers in deciding where to publish, this can be downloaded here (registration required). Taylor & Francis have also created a guide to help researchers, looking at how and where to publish.
See the Researcher Handbook (internal RCSI only) for more information on publishing, including the importance of consistency in using personal, department and institutional names.
Journal metrics, such as Impact Factor, CiteScore, SJR and SNIP can help inform your decision on where to publish.
The best known international indicator is the Impact Factor, which is based on the average number of citations a journal has received over a two year period. The Impact factor is available from Journal Citation Reports (JCR), produced by Clarivate Analytics. Journal Citation Reports can be accessed via the Library’s A-Z listing. Guide to using Journal Citation Reports can be found here.
Other journal indictors are available from Scopus
In order to maximise the visibility of your research, check which database your intended journal is indexed in. You want to ensure that your research will be discoverable in the results of literature/systematic review searches. The publishers’ websites will usually list the databases, but you can also browse journal lists from within the databases themselves.
Ideally, the journal should be indexed in Scopus (the university rankings are currently taken from Scopus), Medline and/or the subject specific database. For instance, it is important that a nursing article is published within a journal indexed by CINAHL (Cumulative Index to Nursing & Allied Health Literature) as nursing related literature searches will always include this database and sometimes may be limited to CINAHL. In this way, you ensure that your article is findable by your network.
Think. Check. Submit. is a campaign to help researchers identify trusted
journals for their research. It is a simple checklist researchers can use to assess the credentials of a journal or publisher. Click on the below logo to go to the Think, Check, Submit website.
