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Publishing Opportunities

Information on where to submit research for publication, including articles and books. It also includes resources for evaluating journals.

What are Journal Metrics?

Journal metrics, such as Impact Factors, are a means of assessing citation trends and patterns in a subject field. Metrics can be useful in evaluating the impact of journals to assist with journal selection for publication, tracking citation patterns, and understanding an author's impact. Below are some sources that can provide deeper insight into various journal metrics and what they represent.

Measuring Impact

Cabells provides acceptance rates, time to review/publication, and journal history. They've established their own Cabells Classification Index (CCI snapshot) as well as listing Altmetrics where available.

Scopus provides three metrics: CiteScore, SJR, and SNIP. To locate a journal's Scopus-provided metrics, search the journal title, publisher, ISSN, or subject in the Sources list. If you cannot find a title in Scopus, check the Master Journal List from Clarivate/Web of Science (linked below).

In addition to traditional publications, Scopus also indexes many Open Access journals with Cite Scores, which can aid in assessing OA journal quality. To read more about evaluating open access journal quality, see the Open Access Publishing page.

Another service, known as SCIMAGOjr, uses data from Scopus to create data visualizations of various metrics such as quartiles. It also subdivides subject categories in a more granular fashion.

Master Journal List is a service from Clarivate, the owners of Web of Science, Journal Citation Reports (JCR), and ProQuest. MJL impact factors are 1-2 years in arrears.

  1. 1. Creating a free account on the Master Journal List website will give you the best functionality.

  2. 2. Journal Citation Indicator is a metric intended to make journal impact scores comparable across disciplines. 

  3. 3. If a title listed in the MJL has no Journal Citation Indicator, the most common reason is that the title is indexed in the Emerging Sources Citation Index. ESCI is where Clarivate puts journals they are evaluating to be included in one of their core citation databases: Science Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index, or Arts and Humanities Citation Index.

For further information on comparing metrics, see the article "Squishy Comparisons: Pending Changes in Impact Metrics" by Chris Carmichael, MSLIS, in the University Libraries newsletter The Stacks or her presentation "Measure for Measure: Finding Impact Metrics in the Library," hosted through the Center for Faculty Excellence.

Finally, for individual journal metrics, many publishers include their most recent Impact Factor on the journal's website.

Google Scholar allows for exploration of publications by subcategories. Journals are ordered by their five-year-h-index and h-median metrics. For personal author metrics, a Google Scholar account can be useful for tracking what has been published under a/your name and where it is being linked. 

A few caveats:

  1. 1. Currently, there is no human oversight over Google Scholar's web-crawling and indexing.
  2. 2. Not all citations are created equal. Google Scholar will include citations to dissertations, presentations, articles, book chapters, regular websites, white papers, and all manner of gray literature.
  3. 3. Being created by machine, Google Scholar's citations are frequently inaccurate and/or incomplete, so use caution when extracting bibliographic information from Google Scholar's Cite tool.  

Workshop: Measure for Measure: Finding Impact Metrics in the Library

CFE x University Libraries Workshop: Measure for Measure

Finding Impact Metrics in the Library

As the scholarly publishing landscape continues to expand, determining the value of any publication becomes more complex. No single metric can or should be a deciding factor. Join Chris Carmichael for this workshop to learn what kinds of metrics are available, where they can be found, and how to use the libraries’ resources to keep track of your impact. 

By the end of this presentation, learners will know:  

  • How to navigate the libraries’ website to get to impact metric resources, 
  • Differences between metric providers, 
  • How to search Scopus to find journal, author, and article-level metrics

Other Metrics

PlumX Analytics is a provider of "altmetrics" or "alternative metrics" that include, but are not limited to social media mentions, bibliographic citation captures, and news articles. PlumX, now owned by Elsevier, has been incorporated into Scopus article records where available.