Citation Reports and Impact Factor
Along with its range and specialisation, the importance of a journal should be considered as you decide where to submit your work. In all disciplines, word of mouth and experience as a reader are your first guide to the importance or authority of an academic or scientific journal. Every field of study has a few journals that rise above the rest – the sort of journals in which the most significant and innovative work by leading academics or scientists in the field is published. Succeeding in having work published in such a journal can earn scholarly respect, make a professional reputation and go a long way toward establishing a healthy career. These journals are well known to everyone associated with a discipline and widely read, so it is easy enough to identify them and discover the kind of work they publish. It is more difficult, however, to decide whether your work is appropriate for such a journal, if for no other reason than because such a judgement involves accurate self-assessment, so the advice of colleagues and mentors recruited as critical readers will be particularly helpful in this regard. You should submit your work to one of these highly respected journals only if it fits the journal’s publishing agenda in both content and significance, not simply because you would really like to be published in it.
It can, for instance, be much more practical, especially as you are working to find your authorial voice early in your career, to choose an appropriate and reputable journal with not quite as much competition for its pages. It is always best to choose a refereed or peer-reviewed journal because this means that the research articles published by that journal have been evaluated by scholars and researchers who specialise in the subject area. Ulrich’s Periodical Directory, online access to which can be gained through most university libraries, can be used to determine whether a journal is peer reviewed, and Journal Citation Reports, also available through most university libraries, provides a way of evaluating the research influence and impact of more than 10,000 science and social science journals. In the second of these publications, citations of research articles are recorded and the number of times the articles published by each journal have been cited over the course of a year is determined to construct an inclusive journal citation network. The citations of the articles published by a journal are averaged to provide an impact factor for the journal over either a two-year or a five-year period, as well as an immediacy index, which indicates the number of times articles published by the journal in a given year have been cited in that same year.
Citation reports and impact factors can be extremely helpful when choosing an influential and respected journal that will effectively make your work accessible to a large number of the readers for whom you are writing, but they should be used with caution. Citation rates in the first years after publication vary from discipline to discipline and even within a discipline one frequently cited article can significantly improve the impact factor of a journal that nonetheless tends to publish articles that are rarely cited. There are also a number of ways in which journals can deliberately skew the citation data: some shy away from publishing articles that are unlikely to be cited no matter how publishable and valuable they may be, while others observe a policy of coercive citation, a practice in which a journal editor forces an author to add spurious citations of articles published by the journal and thus increase the journal’s impact factor before agreeing to publish his or her paper. Such questionable practices suggest that the competition for top ratings among academic and scientific journals is as fierce as that for publication in them among scholarly authors, but the best way in which journals can truly improve their ratings and academics and scientists can have a significant impact through their writing is by maintaining a close focus on scholarship that is as honest as it is accomplished.
Producing honest and accomplished scholarship does not mean, however, that you should not shape and present your article in ways in which the journal you have chosen will find appealing, so the targeted presentation of a paper for a particular journal will be the topic of our next newsletter.
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Our scientific editing, medical editing, bioscience editing, life science editing, environmental science editing, pharmaceutical science editing, physical science editing, agricultural science editing, LaTeX paper editing, social science editing, political science editing, engineering paper editing, psychology editing, research paper editing, manuscript editing, humanities editing, journal article editing, biomedical science editing, planetary science editing, plant science editing, material science editing, veterinary science editing, behavioural science editing and neurosurgery editing services for authors of scientific papers and reports are especially popular, but we also excel at book editing and have the experience and expertise to proofread and edit books and papers of all kinds across every scholarly discipline. Some of our carefully trained editors and proofreaders work exclusively on PhD thesis editing, master’s dissertation proofreading, bachelor’s dissertation proofreading, thesis editing, dissertation editing, thesis proofreading and dissertation proofreading, applying their education and instructional skills in providing thesis editing and dissertation proofreading services that help advanced students to improve the formatting and language of their theses and dissertations and thereby increase their chances of degree success. Whether you are preparing a conference or class presentation, putting the final touches to a professional report for colleagues or tackling the challenging task of editing any kind of academic or scientific document for publication, a qualified member of our outstanding proofreading and editing team will be delighted to provide proofreading and editing services and boost your confidence in your written work.
If you are in the process of preparing an article for an academic or scientific journal, or planning one for the near future, you may well be interested in a new book, Guide to Journal Publication, which is available on our Tips and Advice on Publishing Research in Journals website.
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Pharmaceutical Science Editing
Social Sciences Editing Services
Bachelor’s Dissertation Editing
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