Journal Quality

A range of factors need consideration when choosing a journal in which to publish:

• What is the quality of the journal or journals you are considering to submit your manuscripts?  Quality can be measured in a number of ways, via the Journal Impact Factor, or through other measures of quality such as the Journal Quality List and Association for Information Systems: Journal Rankings.  For more information visit http://qut.to/pozha
• How likely are you to be published in a higher ranking journal?  Depending on a range of factors it may be more appropriate to aim for a lower tier journal to build up a body of work and esteem first.
• What is the time from submission to publication?  Publishers vary in this regard, and some have a longer peer review process.  This may not be a problem, but if you want to expediate publication of your paper you should check with the publisher first.
• Do you want to self-archive the article?  QUT researchers are required to deposit the final accepted version of their manuscript into QUT ePrints. Publisher's policies on self-archiving and Open Access are usually available on the publisher's website.

More information is available on the library's website...

The impact factor is a measure of the frequency with which the "average article" in a journal has been cited in a particular year or period.

Journal Citation Reports (JCR) ® is the only place where impact factors are reported. JCR® covers approximately 7,500 journal titles, which is only a small percentage of all journals in publication.  Most journals do not have an impact factor.

Be aware that...

• Many journals do not have an impact factor.
• The impact factor cannot assess the quality of individual articles. Even if citations were evenly distributed among articles, the impact factor would only measure the interests of other researchers in an article, not its importance and usefulness.
• Only research articles, technical notes and reviews are “citable” items. Editorials, letters, news items and meeting abstracts are “non-citable items”.
• Only a small percentage of articles are highly cited and they are found in a small subset of journals. This small proportion accounts for a large percentage of citations.
• Controversial papers, such as those based on fraudulent data, may be highly cited, distorting the impact factor of a journal.
• Citation bias may exist. For example, English language resources may be favoured. Authors may cite their own work.

The h-index is a variation on the concept of times cited. All papers written by an author are ranked in order of the number of times each one has been cited.  A researcher with an index of h has published h papers with at least h citations each.  eg My h-index is 3 because my top 3 publications have at lease 3 citations each.  Even though my top paper has 50 citations.

A journal will also have an h-index