Sanli
14 September 2008
Where to publish an article?
Tags: Article submission, Impact factor, PublicityPosted in Getting published, High-impact journals, Tips
One writes a scientific article when she thinks she has enough new material in which a sizable fraction of the community is interested. In the time of writing, any article should be written with a lot of enthusiasm, as if it is going to appear on the cover of the most cited journal in the field. But sooner or later, one should decide about the submission destination.
Choosing the journal where you want to publish your article is a very nontrivial task. Frankly speaking, my mind gets occupied with this question, from a very early stage. It may be partly due to my lack of experience or because of my light-weighted publication list.
It may happen that even very experienced scientists cannot publish their article in their firstly-chosen journal. In these cases they may need to try 3 or 4 different journals, and re-format their article a couple of times. This process consumes a lot of work and energy, without adding to the scientific content. Some of this excess work could have been avoided if the first choice was made less ambitiously.
The ultimate goal of publishing an article is to be read and get cited. Unlike the common sense, the impact of a single article is not always dictated by the impact factor of the journal. It is easy to check how many articles in Physical Review Letters (the premier journal in physics) have less than a handful of citations while there exist some other articles with hundreds of citations in a journal that has an impact factor less than one. To get the attention of the community is not just a matter of publishing in a high-impact journal.
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15 Sep 2008 9:43, Ronald Snijder
Can senior collegues assist you here?
19 Sep 2008 10:27, ad lagendijk
An important aspect is whether or not the journal is published by a commercial company (like Nature’s MacMillan or Elsevier Reed ) or by a society (like Science). I strongly prefer non-commercial organizations. The learned societies have scientists as members and are not-for-profit. Although I must admit that some of these societies like the Optical Society of America behave very much as if they have to make a profit. The American Physical Society for instance has an impeccable record with respect to distribution of their journals in developing countries, something a commercial company would never do.
20 Oct 2008 11:52, Allard Mosk
To add to your confusion, (and somewhat doubling Ad’s reasoning) I am very doubtful of the value of “impact factor”, especially of commercial journals.
The reason is the fact that their publication criteria are not clear, and not intended to serve the scientific community.
The editors of a commercial journal make decisions about manuscripts essentially independently of peer review. What do they select for? Those manuscripts that, in the end, will maximize profit for the publisher. That is capitalism, and there is nothing wrong with that. But you need to be aware of the consequences. When the goal of the publisher is to build a long—term reputation of being a high-quality journal, the selection criteria will be to favor important, well-written papers that advance science and technology. When the goal is more short-term, such as establishing a high impact factor quickly, the criteria may slip toward publishing papers based on their anticipated short-term impact.
You will be able to think of excellent papers that have hardly been cited the first five years after they appeared. Probably you will also know some terrible, even wrong, papers that have been cited a lot (I’m not going to give examples). By sacrificing all other publication criteria for “anticipated impact”, editors can boost the impact factor of a commercial journal.
This is very different for society journals that have an open and clear policy about their criteria for publication, often requiring editors to consult referees for almost any decision. When such journals have a high impact factor, it is because they aim for high quality papers, and this correlates somewhat with impact.
In summary, I think there are three important categories of high-impact journals:
– Society journals with clear publication criteria, which are open about their policies.
– Commercial journals with clear long-term goals of building an excellent reputation.
– Journals which (overtly or covertly) strive for high impact factor regardless of quality.
If you submit a manuscript to the first two types of journals, be sure to stress its quality and importance in your submission letter.
If you choose to submit to the third category (who am I to say you shouldn’t?), explain to the editors why you think it will have high impact.
There must be a similar way to class low-impact journals. I’m still thinking about that.