Why Publishing in Journals with High Impact Factor?

Why Publishing in Journals with High 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.

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.

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.