Faculty Guide to the Regis Library

Are you interested in publishing your work? Use this tab to find resources on:

• Finding an appropriate journal to submit your paper to.
• Disseminating journal ranking and impact on the publishing world.
• Understanding what Open Access is and what it means for your work.
• Establishing a digital presence using an ORCID.
• Finding your published research and seeing how many times it's been cited.

Image source: https://library.uwinnipeg.ca/scholarly-communication/index.html

Questions to ask when looking at journals to publish your work (hint: look on the journal's About page on their website):

• Is this journal in my discipline, or in the discipline of my research/work?
• Is the journal indexed in a major database? (i.e. CINAHL, Academic Search Complete, PsycINFO, etc. Check our A-Z list of databases for more.)
• What is the journal's impact factor (see box on Journal Impact Factor for more information)?
• Does the journal have clear submission guidelines and a clearly defined peer-reviewed process?
• Is this journal a part of an organization or university?
• What are the journal's acceptance and citation rates?

Avoiding Predatory Journals

Signs a journal is predatory:

• Charges an egregious publication fee, or only informs about the fee after acceptance.
• Sends out mass spam emails about publishing through their journal or serving on their editorial boards.
• No contact information provided, or difficult to get in touch with.
• Not affiliated with an academic institution or organization.
• Fast acceptance times-- look for evidence of this from an actual article they have published with the Submitted and Accepted dates. Are they days apart or months apart? A longer acceptance time is a sign that a proper review process has been conducted.
• Read the articles published in the suspect journal-- is the writing of high quality? Are there errors in the article (grammatical or otherwise)?

Think. Check. Submit has a great checklist for making sure a journal is legitimate.

There are two figures you can use to determine the prestige of a particular journal:

Impact Factor: The amount of citations divided by the number of articles published in a journal-- within a couple of years.

Immediacy Factor: The amount of citations divided by the number or articles published in a journal-- within the last year.

Places to go for these prestige statistics:

Google Metrics: This link goes to the top 100 Publications in Google Scholar, based on journal h-metrics. For more information on what these stats mean, visit the Google Metrics Overview page.

Eigenfactor: For journals in the scientific field specifically for publishing between 2007-2015. The Eigenfactor has their own way of ranking scientific journals using the number of incoming citations.

Scopus Citescore: From Elsevier-- Search for a specific journal, or browse by discipline- up until 2019.

Scimago Journal and Country Rank: "The SCImago Journal & Country Rank is a publicly available portal that includes the journals and country scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus database."

Further reading:

Niles, M. T., Schimanski, L. A., McKiernan, E. C., & Alperin, J. P. (2020). Why we publish where we do: Faculty publishing values and their relationship to review, promotion and tenure expectations. PloS one, 15(3), e0228914. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0228914

The acceptance rates of a journal show how selective a journal is in the publishing world. You can get more information on this in a couple possible ways:

• Check one of our major discipline databases (i.e. CINAHL Ultimate for Nursing and Allied Health, PsycINFO for Psychology, Education Source for Education, etc.) for articles or reviews on the quality of journals and their acceptance rates. An example of this can be found here.
• Check the journal's About section of their website to see if their acceptance rates are listed there. You may need to contact the editor directly to ask what the acceptance rate of their journal is.

"Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. Open Access ensures that anyone can access and use these results—to turn ideas into industries and breakthroughs into better lives." from SPARC

Why you might want to consider publishing your work as Open Access:

• You own the rights to your work, whereas under most traditional publishing models, the publishers own the rights.
• Your information, ideas, and research can be immediately shared with those that are interested in your discipline.
• Your work is more visible and more likely to be read and cited.

For more information on Open Access journals and publishing:

SPARC: Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition

PLoS: Public Library of Science publishes open access scientific articles.

Open Humanities Press: publishes open access journals in the humanities field, focusing on critical and cultural theory.

Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN): Open Access papers from over 60 disciplines in the Social Sciences field. Hint: when browsing articles, change Sort by to Date, Descending to see the most up-to-date research.

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ): A repository of all registered open access journals and articles.

You have published your paper! Now how do you find it to see its impact in the publishing world?  There are a couple of ways:

• You can search our databases. If the journal and article has been indexed in the databases, it will show in PowerSearch. You can see what discipline-specific database it's been indexed in.

Then, go to that specific database in our A-Z list and search for your article. If the article has been cited in that database before, there will be a link below it to the article that cited yours.

• Another way is through Google Scholar. When you search for your article, you can see how many times the article has been cited in the larger publishing world.

An ORCiD is a persistent digital identifier for authors publishing online (like a DOI for articles!). Why you might want to consider registering for one:

• It is a unique ID that distinguishes you from other authors, especially if you have a common last name and even if you have gotten married and changed your name.
• Be included in Altmetrics resources (resources that are used to track the impact of online scholarship and research).
• Become more searchable in certain databases that include an ORCiD field.
• Include your ORCiD number in your LinkedIn profile or your CV so potential employers will be able to find your scholarly presence online.

You can register for an ORCiD and find more information here.