Measure Your Research Impact: Where to Publish
Learn how to measure the impact of your research.
Created by Health Science Librarians
Research Hub
Journal Selection Considerations
Where you publish can be as important as what you publish.
Consider the following when selecting a journal to which to submit your article:
- Relevance: The journal should publish research that is relevant to your work, the type of article that you want to publish, and reach the audience that you want to read your work. For interdisciplinary research, finding a relevant journal may mean looking beyond the journals in your field.
- Discoverability: The journal should be indexed by major citation and abstract databases, such as PubMed, Web of Science and Scopus.
- Quality: Where does the journal ranked according to impact factor and other measures of journal quality? Who is on the editorial board of the journal?
- Public Access: Does your article need to comply with the NIH Public Access Policy?
- Open Access: Do you wish to publish in an open access journal, which will make the full text of your work freely available online at the time of publication?
Check out the boxes below for resources on finding a journal and evaluating journal quality.
Finding a Journal
Consider the following when searching for and selecting a journal:
- Is the journal peer-reviewed?
- Is the journal relevant to your research? Check your references to see what journals they were published in.
- Does the journal publish the type of article that you wish to submit?
- Does the journal reach the audience that you want to read your research?
- Where is the journal indexed? This information can often be found on the journal's website, or check Ulrichsweb (see below).
- Do you wish to publish in an open access journal?
- Does the journal have an article processing charge (APC)? Many open access journals have an APC.
Listed below are several resources for finding journals in which to publish your research.
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Directory of Open Access JournalsDatabase of open access scientific and scholarly journals. Search for a specific journal title or browse by subject.
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Jane (Journal/Author Name Estimator)Tool that compares the title and/or abstract of your article to Medline records to find journals that are the best match.
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ScopusA large citation and abstracting database providing comprehensive coverage of the peer-reviewed journal and conference literature, with links to full-text where available through the library; includes scientific, technical, medical, social science and arts and humanities disciplines and indexes over 20,500 titles from more than 5,000 international publishers including over 340 book series. Like Web of Science, Scopus allows researchers to perform citation searches to see how many times a work has been cited, by whom, and to rank searches by times cited, for the period 1996 -present, as well as its curated index of over 375 scientific web pages and over 24 million patents.
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Ulrichs Web OnlineUlrich's Periodicals Directory is a bibliographic database providing detailed, comprehensive, and authoritative information on serials published throughout the world. It covers all subjects and includes publications that are published regularly or irregularly and are circulated free of charge or by paid subscription. ULRICHSWEB.com is updated weekly and contains search and browse indexes--such as language and frequency--that are not found in the print version. In addition ULRICHSWEB.com links users to related serials for alternate titles and alternate media formats and contains tens of thousands of URLs and e-mail addresses for links to journals and publishers. ULRICHSWEB.com gives users access to serials information beyond the title level, with links to tables of contents, article abstracts, journal full-text, and document delivery.
Note: Users will need to register for a free individual account to take advantage of the full functionality of this resource.
Evaluating Journal Quality
Consider the following when evaluating the quality of a journal:
- Where is the journal ranked according to Impact Factor, Eigenfactor and SCImago Journal Ranking?
- Who is on the editorial board of the journal?
- If the journal is open access, then who is the publisher?
Listed below are several resources to help you evaluate the quality of a journal.
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Google Scholar Top Publications ListList of the top 100 publications according to the h5-index, the h-index for articles published in the last 5 years. Top 20 lists available for several disciplines.
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Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA)If you are considering publishing in an open access journal, then the publisher of the journal should be on the OASPA membership list.
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Beall's List of Predatory Publishers (Archived)List of potential, possible or probable predatory scholarly open access publishers. If you are considering publishing in an open access journal, then the publisher of that journal should NOT be on this list.
Learn More About Open Access
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Open Access and Scholarly CommunicationsThis guide from the UNC-CH Health Sciences Library provides details on open access publishing options and addresses misconceptions about open access.
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Open Access OverviewOverview of open access written by the director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication.
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Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)Click on the issues and resources tabs to learn more about open access.
Broaden Your Impact
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Carolina Digital RepositoryLong-term storage and access for scholarly works, datasets, research materials and records produced by the UNC-CH community.
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Broadening Your ImpactGuide from Cornell University Library provides suggestions for alternative forms of publishing and connecting with the research community.
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