The quality of a journal
The quality of a journal
Upon finalising you research project, the traditional ultimate step is to make the work available to the research community by publishing it, for instance in a journal. Given the extensive time spent on your research, and the potential implications for your career, authors should carefully select a proper place for their work. With thousands of journals listed in the main bibliographical databases such as Web of Science and PubMed, or local initiatives such as the Flemish Academic Bibliography for the Social Sciences and Humanities (VABB-SHW), researchers can become overwhelmed by the possibilities. Moreover, as journals are not always indexed in the most frequently used databases, the number of journals to choose from is almost unlimited. Therefore, when assessing potential journals to publish your work, critical factors to look into are the reputation and the quality of a journal and its publisher, together with the scope of the journal.
The scope of the journal is important as it can impact who will get to read your work. Although you might have the most interesting/important paper ever, if it doesn’t get published in a place where it gets appropriate visibility, your work might not get picked up. This of course doesn’t mean that you should not publish your work in journals that have a broad scope. Nevertheless, try to identify the profile of the readers of the journal. Is your work relevant to them?
When it comes to the reputation of the journal, authors are encouraged to look further than the journal impact factor and instead assess the quality of the journal and the papers previously published by the journal and its publisher. Does the journal appear trustworthy and does it have policies in place to make sure that the submitted research is evaluated according to the internationally accepted principles? For example, does the journal provide clear instructions to authors and is a solid peer review system in place?
Who is involved?
(Co-) Author
The authors have to go into dialogue to determine the appropriate journal to submit the work to.
As ‘host’ of the work, journals and publishers need to demonstrate that they follow good publishing practices when evaluating and publishing scientific papers.
Predators in publishing
The traditional sequence of submitting a manuscript to a journal to have it critically reviewed, followed by a revision of the work to get it up to standard is undermined by predatory journals and publishers. Profiting off the obligation that some funders have set to have the research they finance published under Open Access, combined with the difficulty some researchers experience to have their work accepted, some journals and publishers misuse the system for their own (monetary) interest. Predatory journals basically accept any manuscript as long as the researcher is willing to pay the publication fee. Furthermore, by not providing or only having a minimal peer review procedure in place, the quality of the published work is often below par. For example this case of a journal that published a spoof COVID-19 paper called “Cyllage COVID-19 Outbreak Linked to Zubat consumption” (2020).
Researchers have to be aware of the existence of the problem. Because of the questionable quality of papers published by predatory journals, the readers of the study should be critical when interpreting the work and considering the study as a basis for their own work. This is especially important in fields where the work can be misused to misinform society. One can for example think of findings in biomedical sciences that could severely impact public opinion on a specific topic or have implications for standard patient care. Conversely, authors should make sure not to engage with predatory journals to publish their own work. Not only can this severely impact your personal reputation, you should also be aware that predatory journals often only stay around for a limited time, and can disappear without warning, taking all published papers offline and thus leaving the authors with empty hands
In order to determine whether a journal and/or publisher is trustworthy, authors can position the journal along some basic evaluation criteria. The Think. Check. Submit. checklist provides a good overview of important questions authors have to ask themselves when looking into suitable journals.
Some general recommendations
- Think. Check. Submit. provides a checklist to help you identify the right journal for your research.
- Does VABB-SSHW list the journal?
- Is the journal a member of COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics)? Members adhere to the Core practices.
- Does a learned society sponsor the journal?
- Is the publisher or journal one of the signatories of the Transparency & Openness Initiative
- Have (many of) your trusted peers published in this journal?
Predatory conferences
Contrary to what most academics believe, not all predatory conferences are small, poorly organised, and organised by fly-by-night organisations. In order to ensure that they make profits, a decent organisation is usually set up. One telltale sign of a predatory conference is low-quality research that is often presented alongside research by famous academics. Enego on predatory conferences.
While predatory conferences exist in high numbers, there are initiatives that guide researches to avoid these conferences. Think. Check. Attend. is an organisation that helps researchers and academics decide whether the conference of legitimate or not.