lecture 31

Journal characteristics continue:

- Classically, journals required that you mail in a hard copy of your article to the journal. - Most journals have now moved to the online method of submission where the author uploads the manuscript to the Journal's website. - Many journals allow authors to track their article online throughout the peer review process. - Some journals will only publish an article in the printed journal without online access....in other words, you will need to become a member of the society which sponsors that journal. - Other journals offer both a printed and online access to the subscription (still have to pay $$). - Some journals have no paper copy but only offer online access to your paper. Many authors are wary of on online only journal because it leaves no permanent paper trail especially if the journal is unproven.

What are other journal characteristics?

- Some journals will provide information on the average time period between submission and publication. - Other journals will provide information about the time period between submission and when the reviewer's comments will be back to you. - Many specialty journals with high acceptance rates will have a lengthy wait period because they send your paper to 3,4 maybe 5 reviewers. - All these factors need to be considered before you make your final decision on your target journal.

BEALL'S LIST OF PREDATORY​JOURNALS AND PUBLISHERS

- Thousands of academic journals do not aspire to quality. - They exist primarily to extract fees from authors. - These 'predatory' journals exhibit questionable marketing schemes, follow lax or non-existent peer-review procedures and fail to provide scientific rigor or transparency. - Beall's list of predatory journals is a list of questionable, scholarly open-access publishers. - They recommend that scholars read the available reviews, assessments and descriptions provided here, and then decide for themselves whether they want to submit articles, serve as editors or on editorial boards. Nature: Predatory journals recruit fake editor

In choosing a target journal there are several point you need to consider:

1) Format outline structure (Intro, M&M, Results, Discussion...) 2) Appropriate voice and writing style 3) Amount of technical detail to include 4) Reference and citation style 5) Aim and scope of the journal 6) The journal's audience (Scientists? Clinicians?) 7) The journal's impact factor and other metrics 8) Cost of publication 9) Online access options

There are many closed access journals that are not very reputable and many open access journals that are reputable. You can figure out the ones that are reputable by looking at three things:

1) What journals are being cited in other journals of known reputation? Journals that get citations in other journals are likely to be publishing decent research. 2) Who is publishing in the journal? Reputable scholars tend to publish in reputable outlets. If a journal has prominent scholars publishing good work there, it's probably a decent journal. 3) Who sponsors and publishes the journal? Reputable journals (especially in the social sciences) tend to be published by or endorsed by scholarly associations.

What is the process of selecting a target journal?

1) decide on the writing project 2) choose a target journal 3) get information about the journal - mission/vision of the journal - identify categories of submission - identify key subject areas 4) analyse the journal 5) select a sample paper from the target journal 6) follow the guidelines for authors

Some journals may accept short reports, _____ words or less.

1,000 - Some journals will accept lengthy articles with a 3,500 word limit with a maximum of 4 tables/figures.

After you select your target journal, look at the journal's _____ for additional information before you begin to write.

Author Guidelines - For example, if you are writing a Review Article, make sure that the target journal will accept a review article.

If you are writing a case report, make sure that the target journal will accept a case report. When in doubt,...

Email the editor or the Journal's administrative person and ask.

Beware of ______ impact factors and other misleading metrics placed on the web site of some low-quality journals.

FAKE

_____ are produced by companies not affiliated with Thomson Reuters. These are often used by predatory publishers.

Fake impact factors - The Journal Impact Factor metric is a trademark of the Thomson Reuters company. - Consult Thomson Reuters' Master Journal List to confirm if they have indexed the publication. This is a necessary first step for obtaining an Impact Factor.

- Use the_______ to locate impact factors.

Journal Citation Reports (JCR) - The impact factor is a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year. - The JCR also lists journals and their impact factors and ranking in the context of their specific field(s).

Although the idea of a journal that is freely available to the public with no financial barriers to access seems great in theory, when it comes time to publish, many researchers struggle with the decision of whether to do so in an _______

OA journal versus a traditional (and perhaps more well-established) journal. REMEMBER: The four main factors to consider when making this decision are visibility, cost, prestige, and speed.

It is also important to check which _____ databases index the journal.

abstracting - Some published researchers prioritize the journals indexed in MEDLINE or other disciplinary collections because being well indexed increases the likelihood that a published article will be both read and cited.

Often the _____ of the journal is relatively straight forward as you can tell by the name and articles in it.

aims and scope

Also, considering the ____ of the journal can be as important. If your paper is heavy technical science, and the journal focuses on clinical cases, maybe the match is not a good one.

audience

We live in a society that is increasingly Internet-centric, and this shift in the way that we....

communicate, connect, share, and do business with each other has deeply impacted scientific research and academic publishing.

One of the more important factors to consider when choosing a potential target journal is the ______ with the aims, scope and audience of the journal.

fit of your research topic

The higher the impact factor, the more _______ the journal. It is one tool you can use to compare journals in a subject category.

highly ranked

The__________ of an academic journal is a measure reflecting the yearly average number of citations to recent articles published in that journal. ...

impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) - Impact factors are calculated yearly starting from 1975 for journals listed in the Journal Citation Reports.

Predatory journals have rapidly ______

increased their publication volumes from 53,000 in 2010 to an estimated 420,000 articles in 2014, published by around 8,000 active journals.

Some journals are _____ while others focus on just a _____ of the world.

international; specific region - A journal focused on liver diseases in southeast Asia would not be an appropriate target journal for a paper on nutritional deficiencies in Cameroon.

Some journals have a very _____ focus on what they publish while other journals have a _____ focus.

narrow; broad - Some journals will just publish on just one subspecialty area.

Most ________ publishers charge fees that are much lower than the industry's average revenue, although there is a wide scatter between journals. The largest open-access publishers — BioMed Central and PLoS — charge $1,350-2,250 to publish peer-reviewed articles in many of their journals, although their most selective offerings charge $2,700-2,900.

open-access

Indeed, it is no longer necessary to leave the lab and spend all afternoon in the library stacks - much of the information needed to do research is available on ______

our own personal computers.

As mentioned above, _____ journals exhibit questionable marketing schemes, follow lax or non-existent peer-review procedures and fail to provide scientific rigor or transparency.

predatory - Publishing in a predatory journal can blemish you professionally.

Authors should choose a ______ early in the writing process and 3-4 secondary choice journals.

primary target journal

With open access journals, the author pays the fees to cover the cost of _______ and then anyone can download the paper for free. This gives a greater chance that your paper will be used by other researchers.

publication

However, since the advent of the Internet, scientists no longer _____ of their favorite journal to keep in touch with the most recent developments.

require access to the latest hard copy

Knowing the journal you want to publish in ahead of time allows you to tailor your writing for the format required for that journal. - The best way to search out the best possible target journal is to look at _____ in that journal to make sure that your project subject area is similar to what the journal publishes.

several papers previously published - Actually, in doing your literature search for your paper, it is likely that one or more of the journal articles used come from a suitable target journal for your research.

The regional distribution of both the publisher's country and authorship is highly _______, with three quarters of authors hailing from Asia or Africa. Authors paid an average fee of 178 USD per article for articles typically published within 2 to 3 months of submission.

skewed

With a _________ professional society sponsored journal where the paper is printed in a hard copy, the authors still may have to pay several hundred dollars/page but then your paper will not be available to download by other without paying a fee...$50 to several hundred dollars.

traditional Most academic libraries may have access to the article through interlibrary loan.

The reputation of journals derives from ____ in a particular discipline.

views of scholars

Many researchers struggle with the decision of whether to do so in an Open Access journal versus a traditional (and perhaps more well-established) journal. - The four main factors to consider when making this decision are:

•visibility •cost •prestige •Speed