The first year Doctoral Students recently were invited to a workshop by the UOC Library on how to identify leading journals. As many of us spend most of our days trawling through journal articles, this workshop came at a very good time. This post summarises my takeaways from the workshop. There some basic questions to consider when reviewing a journal:
- How are the articles peer-reviewed?
- Which scientific databases is the journal indexed in?
- What is the impact factor of the journal?
- What is the SCImago Journal Rank?
- Are the editor / editorial board respected researchers in the field?
- What is the access policy of the journal? E.g. open access
There are several databases that index research articles and journals. A few are freely available and most require a subscription. Which ones to use depend which field you work in and which ones your institutional library subscribes to. Some of the well-known ones are EBSCOHost, ScienceDirect, Scopus and Web of Science. For educational related databases there is also EdITLib and ERIC (Educational Resource Information Center).
The Impact Factor
The impact factor is a measure of how often an article in a particular journal has been cited on average. It is usually calculated by # of citations and # of articles published over a 2 year period. There is also a longer 5 year period impact.
SCImago Journal Rank Indicator (SJR)
The SJR measures scientific influence of scholarly journals that accounts for both the number of citations received by a journal and the importance or prestige of the journal. It is usually calculated over a 3 year period and excludes self-citations and assigns a weighting based on prestige. Journals in a field are organized into quartiles, with Q1 and Q2 considered high-impact journals.
Open access journals are listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).
Another useful index is the H index that attempts to measure both the productivity and citation impact of the published body of work of a scientist. You can see a researcher’s H score in Google Scholar. The H index measures publications and citations.
Thank you to Marie and Neus from the UOC Library for organising the very informative workshop.