How to write and publish a scientific paper - Barbara Gastel, Robert A. Day 2022

Prestige and impact
Where to submit your manuscript
Some preliminaries

If several journals seem suitable, does it matter which one you choose? Perhaps it shouldn’t matter, but it does. There is the matter of prestige. Maybe progress in your career (job offers, promotions, grants, etc.) will be determined largely by how many papers you publish. But not necessarily. It may well be that a wise old bird sitting on the faculty committee or the grant review panel will recognize and appreciate quality factors. A paper published in a “garbage” journal simply does not equal a paper published in a prestigious journal. In fact, the wise old bird (and there are quite a few of these in science) may be more impressed by the candidate with one or two solid publications in prestigious journals than by the candidate with 10 or more publications in second- or third-rate journals.

How do you tell the difference? It isn’t easy, and of course there are many gradations. In general, however, you can form reasonable judgments by doing just a bit of bibliographic research. You will certainly know the important papers that have recently been published in your field. Make it your business to determine where they were published. If most of the real contributions in your field were published in Journal A, Journal B, and Journal C, you should probably limit your choices to those three journals. If Journals D, E, and F, upon inspection, contain only the lightweight papers, each could be eliminated as your first choice, even if the scope is right.

You may then choose among Journals A, B, and C. Suppose that Journal A is an attractive new journal published by a commercial publisher as a commercial venture, with no sponsorship by a society or other organization; Journal B is an old, well-known small journal published by a famous university, hospital, or museum; and Journal C is a large journal published by the principal scientific society in your field. In general (although there are many exceptions), Journal C (the society journal) is probably the most prestigious. It will also have the largest circulation (partly because of quality factors and partly because society journals tend to be less expensive than others, at least to society members). By publication in such a journal, your paper may have its best chance to make an impact on the community of scholars at whom you are aiming. Journal B might have almost equal prestige, but it might have a very limited circulation, which would be a minus; it might also be very difficult to get into if most of its space is reserved for in-house material. Journal A (the commercial journal) might well have the disadvantage of low circulation (because of its comparatively high price, which is the result of both the profit motivation of the publisher and the lack of backing by a society or institution with a built-in subscription list). Publication in such a journal may result in a somewhat restricted distribution of your paper.

Be wary of new journals, especially those not sponsored by a society. (In particular, avoid predatory journals, which are discussed later in this chapter.) The circulation may be minuscule, and the journal might fail before it, and your paper, become known to the scientific world. Be wary of publishing in journals that are solely electronic unless you know that those evaluating your work for purposes such as promotion consider those journals sufficiently prestigious. On the other hand, also be wary of publishing in the increasingly few journals that appear only in print, as scientists today expect important scientific literature to be accessible online.

One tool for estimating the relative prestige of journals in a given field is the electronic resource Journal Citation Reports, commonly available through academic libraries. With this resource, you can determine which journals have recently been cited most frequently, both in total and in terms of the average number of citations per article published, or the impact factor (Garfield 1999). Although not all good journals have impact factors computed, impact factor can be worth considering in judging the prominence of journals. If, in a given field, the average paper in Journal A is cited twice as frequently as the average paper in Journal B, it is likely that researchers find Journal A the more important journal.

In some countries and institutions, the criteria considered when candidates are evaluated for promotion include the impact factors of journals in which their papers appear. However, limitations of the impact factor also should be noted. The impact factor indicates how much the papers in a journal are cited on average—not how much your paper will be cited if it appears in the journal. It does not indicate how much impact, other than on citation, the papers in a journal have—for example, how much they influence policy or clinical practice. And because different scientific fields have different citation practices, impact factors should not be used to compare the importance of journals in different fields. For instance, in biochemistry and molecular biology, in which papers tend to cite many recent papers, the impact factor of the top-cited journal was 53.4 in the year 2020, but in geology it was 5.4. In short, although knowing a journal’s impact-factor ranking in its field can help you assess its scientific importance, the impact factor does not say everything about the journal’s quality or its suitability for your work. In journal selection, as in much else in life, a multidimensional concept cannot validly be reduced to a single number.

(ScienceCartoonsPlus.com)

Increasingly, experts have emphasized the need to include indicators other than impact factor when assessing the importance of a person’s research. For example, the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (2012), commonly called DORA, calls for using more varied approaches in evaluating research output. These approaches include—in addition to, most importantly, evaluating the scientific content of the article—using multiple journal-based metrics (rather than only impact factor) and looking at article-level metrics. Examples of the latter include how many times an article has been viewed, downloaded, or bookmarked; how much attention it has received in social media and mass media; and how many times and where it has been cited (Tananbaum 2013). Noticing which journals’ articles in your field tend to receive such attention can aid in identifying suitable journals for your papers.