Scholarly Resources for Engineering and Applied Sciences Graduate Students: Finding Publishing Venues + Scholarly Metrics

Congratulations, you've done some literature research (and likely some original research too) and you are writing up your research to share with the world. This page covers strategies for finding journals and conferences relevant to your research. You will learn the pros and cons of journal rankings. Finally, I offer my recommendations for the factors you should consider when evaluating a journal for publication, including author's rights and Open Access.    

My first recommendation for exploring journals or conferences where you might share your work is to identify where work similar to yours is being published or presented. An efficient way to do this is to use your citation management tool to illuminate which journals or conferences the literature you located on your topic is most often published/presented in.

Next, get to know the pros and cons of journal rankings and how to find ranked journal lists by subject:

What are journal rankings?

Journal rankings are formulas or algorithms that assign a numeric value to a journal, which attempts to measure how impactful or great the reach of a journal is. Journal rankings can be useful to help you determine important journals to follow and publish with in your field. However journal rankings are problematic and there are some important caveats to consider when using journal rankings:

• Journal rankings attempt to quantify something that is unquantifiable - how "good" a journal is.
• Several different formulas or algorithms have been developed because there is disagreement about how impact should be calculated. Different formulas put emphasis on different things.
• The rankings are all at least somewhat based on citation rates.  Different disciplines have different citation patterns, thus many journal ranking values cannot be compared across different fields.
• The differences between two journals that are ranked next to each other on a list are usually minimal. I recommend considering journal rankings in quadrants. Knowing which journals are in the first quadrant (Q1) vs. the fourth quadrant (Q4) is more useful than the difference between a journal with a 13.1 JIF and a journal with a 12.8 JIF - those journals are both in Q1.

What are some journal ranking formulas?

Here are four common journal ranking formulas or algorithms, with a bit of information about how the formula works.

• Journal Impact Factor (JIF)  is a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year. The calculation is based on a two-year period and involves dividing the number of times articles were cited by the number of articles that are citable. (The Clarivate Analytics Impact Factor)
• Journal Citation Indicator (JCI) normalizes for different fields of research and their widely varying rates of publication and citation. This metric aims to provide a journal-level metric that can be easily interpreted and compared across disciplines. A JCI value of 1.0 means that, across the journal, published papers received a number of citations equal to the average citation count in that subject category. A journal receiving a JCI score of 3.5 has performed three-and-a-half times better than average. However, a journal receiving a JCI score of 0.5 will be considered to have performed only half as good as the average. (Introducing the Journal Citation Indicator)
• Eigenfactor scores are intended to give a measure of how likely a journal is to be used, and are thought to reflect how frequently an average researcher would access content from that journal. Eigenfactor scores rank journals much as Google ranks websites. Some of the factors eigenfactor scores take into account include citation influence, journal price, citation differences across disciplines. In addition, Eigenfactor scores rely on five-year citation data. (Eigenfactor.org)
• SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) indicator was developed from the widely known algorithm Google PageRank™. SJR "assign[s] weights to bibliographic citations based on the importance of the journals that issued them, so that citations issued by more important journals will be more valuable than those issued by less important ones. This "importance" will be computed recursively, i.e., the important journals will be those which in turn receive many citations from other important journals." (SJR)

How do I find ranked journal lists?

Find a ranked list of journals according to the metrics Journal Impact Factor (JIF), Journal Citation Indicator (JCI), and Eigenfactor in:

Now that you have identified several journals or conferences that might be a good fit for your research article, you will want to further evaluate the journals to make sure it is the right fit. Visit the webpage for the journal; and ask mentors, instructors, and peers about the reputation of the journal. Factors to consider include:

• Aim and Scope: What kind of research and articles are published in the journal?
• Timing: What is the typical turnaround time from submission to publication, and will this meet your needs?
• Review Quality: Peer-review can be daunting, but quality feedback will strengthen and improve your research and writing. Effective editors will make sure your work is clear and concise.
• Author Rights: You are the copyright owner of work you author, however some publishers require you to sign away your copyright in exchange for publishing and distributing your work. Search SHERPA/RoMEO, an online database of publishers' copyright policies to find out what the publisher typically allows authors to do with their works.
  • You may be interested in negotiating your author rights, which the the IUPUI Copyright Management Center provides guidance on in Reserving Rights of Use in Works Submitted for Publication. 
• Open Access (OA): If you'd your work to be free to read and have greater visibility and citations, consider publishing OA. Find OA journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), apply for funding to cover reasonable fees charged by OA journals, and/or share your work via our institutional repository CU Scholar. 
• Conference Considerations: Does the conference publish proceedings or abstracts? What are your options for publishing the same or similar work later in a journal? What are the costs to travel to and attend the conference? (hint, check for student rates!)

For a more detailed list of criteria you may wish to consider when evaluating a journal, check out:

Additional Scholarly Metrics

In addition to journal rankings, there are metrics for the scholarly impact of:

• individual articles: citation counts
• data sets: citation counts, downloads and re-use of data
• researcher metrics or individual impact: H-Index, G-Index, i10-Index and Altmetrics

Explore the guide below to find tools that report the various scholarly metrics:

Copyright and Negotiating Your Author Rights

Open Access

CU Boulder Libraries provide expertise, funding, and infrastructure to support Open Access publishing: