No matter if you’re an experienced scholar or a newbie, choosing the right journal for your paper is a time-consuming and complex process, maybe the most important step of your research course. Presumably, you’ve invested a lot of time, effort and resources to get the study done, and the outcome of this endeavor hinges on one crucial step – choosing the right credible quality high impact journal for publication suitable for your line of work by checking the journal impact factor and journal rank.
There are hundreds or even thousands of available journals worldwide, and the number grows by the day. They differ in recognition, respectability and prominence, in how widely they’re read, shared and cited. Not all of them can be the best, some are relatively new and others are actually low-quality, and not all are suitable for your paper. First, you want to pick a top five favorite journals that provide your daily reading material. Next, you want to check the structure, quality and discourse of the published papers and align your article to their guidelines, as this will scale up your chances for publication
Don’t forget to include some of their papers in your reference list. Now, how to select one quality high impact journal or even five for that matter?
Don’t fall into a classic trap of blind-choosing the journal by the title. Just because the topic collides, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll get published. There are journals that are high on ambiguity, with aim and scope encompassing broad a variety of subjects, meaning, they specialize in nothing. Not surprisingly, the acceptance rate is pretty of the chart, and for a reason. To avoid this mistake, a better strategy to follow is to check for the most common measures of journal quality, i.e., the Journal Impact Factor, SCImago Journal Rank and H-index.
Check out our article on reliable academic sources
What is the Journal Impact Factor (JIF)?
The impact factor is a measure of the journal’s quality in terms of influence, relevance and popularity in the scientific community. The higher the impact factor, the more prominent and prestigious the journal. The quality is reflected in the frequency of citations in related respectable journals, according to accepted scientific parameters. It is calculated over three years for the average number of citations up to two years post-publication.
The SCImago Journal Rank (SJR)
The SCImago journal rank (SJR) is a scale ranking journals by the average score frequency of citations received by the article in a specific year divided by the number of studies published in the journal in the preceding three years.SCImago offers a variety of journal metrics to measure high quality impact journal based on Scopus data. It also provides a rank list for 27 relevant subject domains and 295 sub-categories.
What is H-index?
The H-index is a relevant indicator of academicians’ productiveness, prominence and influence, numerically reflecting contributions one has made to the academic community. It represents the measure for quantifying a research entity’s scientific output. It is attributed to individual scientists, research facilities, higher education institutions, or even states. The calculation rationale is as follows: an index is equal to H if a researcher has published N papers and H of these papers’ citation for some are equal to H or greater, while for others it can be less than H. H-index accounts for a number of publications and citations. To put it simply, a researcher is rewarded for being cited in a number of other publications.
For more expert advice on academic publishing, check out our research toolkit
Authors generally strive to get published in quality high impact journal as this will secure exposure and access to a wider readership, greater influence, and help attract funding for future projects. However, to maintain the standard of journal impact factor, quality high impact journals have greater rejection rates than your average less influential publication. This means you should make extra effort to optimize your article to suit the preferred platform and focus more on improving the article quality.
