How do people choose the journal to submit their research output? This is a question I have had to ask myself recently because I have been considering where to submit new results. As I have said elsewhere, a large number of people go for the highest impact factor journal. However, there must be some self-regulatory impulse, otherwise everyone will submit to Science or Nature in the first instance. I would like to explore this further if anyone wants to pick it up. Do people have a pecking order and do they judge perceived quality/impact of their work befor matching with the journal in the list?
So where do I tend to publish? A lot will depend on the content. If the work is in structural materials science, the market leader is Acta Materialia (even if it has the ugliest Cod Latin title I know) but its impact factor, at 3.5, would be regarded as derisory by many in othet fields. If you look at the highest impact Journals in Materials Science they are either review journals or ultra-short letter Journals (Nature Materials, Advanced Materials). It can be difficult showing logical analysis, especially when figures are required and a sequence of equations useful, in a 4 page format. I also feel that “supplementary data available online” is a cop out. If its needed for the argument it should be in the main body and not used as an excuse to fit within the required page limit.
So, to the current dilemma. At the moment we are looking to publish results on the mechanical properties of biological tissue, with co-autors from the Life Sciences and Physical Sciences. If you suggest a journal that takes a lot of Nanpindentation papers and thus if you publish there it will be noticed by the testing community but it has an impact factor of 2.4 (J. Mater. Res.) the Lifers consider the suggestion at best a waste of time and at worst an insult. But if we only publish in Circulation, non-biologists will not be exposed to it.
Well it looks as though we should publish everything twice, once in a format for each community with suitable maximisation of cross-referencing to boost citations!
Hello,
In my view, for the vast majority, the purpose to publish an article is to make an influence. So impact factor is always playing it role. My formula is:
Actual impact factor I should pursue= impact factor targeted x
confidence level (I have on my article, between 0~1). The full score of the confidence level is 1 and the confidence level comes from the “completeness” of my work revealed in the study.
indy
Have you looked at Interface? It sounds like the profile is right.
You write: “there must be some self-regulatory impulse” – less than you might think, particularly since the onset of online submissions, making it (in principle) relatively easy to submit to several journals. (Some people have even been known to do this simultaneously which of course is against the rules.)
You might also look at publishers who produce a range of journals, or subject areas that have persuaded publishers to collaborate – there is a neuroscience consortium, for example, where rejected submissions can be transferred by the authors to another neuroscience journal without having to go through all the uploading process again, and Nature/NPG journals have offered a similar service for years. (Maybe other publishers also, I am not sure.) This saves authors a lot of time if one journal in the consortium cannot offer to publish (authors can also choose to transfer referees’ reports if they like, eg if the paper is technically sound but is declined on editorial grounds).
I’ll just add another general point: if you are not too concerned about impact factors, in some ways the journal is less relevant. At Nature, for example, most of our papers are accessed directly via internet searches, eg google (internet wide search) or pubmed (abstract database search), rather than in the traditional way via the journal’s home page.
See a new Nature Network forum, Citation in Science, for further discussion of some (but by no means all) aspects of this question.