This post continues our series about publishing your first paper. We have already covered considerations for when and what you may want to publish. Now for the fun one: deciding where to publish your PhD research.
Choosing where to publish is probably the most contentious question in academia. I hope this post helps with your decision making!
Considerations for where to publish your PhD research
The main reason to publish anything in academia should come down to wanting to help progress the field and provide insights which could be used to inform future research. For an in-depth look into this and other reasons for publishing your PhD research, see the full post here.
No matter your reasons for publishing, it makes sense to aim for a journal which will enable as many researchers who could be interested in your work to see it. In reality though, other factors may come into play which could impact your choice of journal. These include:
- What is the journal’s average response time?
- Does the journal publish many papers using similar methods and techniques to yours? See the Appropriateness section further down the page for more details.
- Is the submission process simple? Would submission there require loads of formatting which is only relevant to that one journal?
- Will relevant researchers in your field see it?
- What does it cost to publish there?
- Are you only interested in publishing to help researchers or do you want kudos? Publishing in a certain journey may help boost your career prospects if you’re staying in research.
- How difficult is it to get something published there?
The choice of where to publish typically comes down to three main factors:
- Journal prestige and impact factor
- Relevance to the audience
- Appropriateness for your study design
Journal prestige and impact factor
Prestige
Let’s get this out the way first: researchers can be snobby about journals!
Disregarding the actual content of your study, successfully getting something published in a prestigious journal can become an accolade in and of itself.
The idea is that getting something accepted in a high tier journal signals the quality of the work. On the flip side, if something is published in a journal no one has heard of, questions may be raised of how rigorous the review process was.
Publishing in a prestigious journal of course can bring kudos to you and your co-authors and look great on a CV, but does it actually make your research any better?
A journal only accepts papers that are within its scope, that is to say that they’re relevant to the audience. Yet, aiming for a top journal won’t necessarily mean that the highest amount of relevant researchers will necessarily see it.
How do researchers actually find papers?
Some of the main ways people find papers are as follows:
- Reading the actual journal, either in paper form or online. Speaking to academics you’ll often find that there are a few key journals they regularly check for new research in their field.
- Searching for relevant papers as part of your literature search. Using tools such as Google Scholar or Web of Science.
- Setting up automated alerts for certain topics, keywords or researchers. I do this and get an email every time something new is published in the area.
Clearly not everyone reading your work will find it through the journal itself. I myself rarely browse a journal and instead mostly rely on method 2 to find papers relevant to my research. Even so the journal can still matter:
My experience: Ultimately the reputation of a journal can still play a part in how many people will actually read your article, no matter how researchers find it.
I’ve worked with researchers who won’t read an article if they don’t recognise (or have had a bad experience with) a certain journal. This is pretty understandable with the rise of sketchy predatory journals and the numbers of journals constantly increasing, making it difficult to work out which ones even carry out solid peer-review.
One useful measure which researchers will often turn to for an initial assessment of a journal, and the papers it publishes, is impact factor.
Journal Impact Factor
What is impact factor?
The impact factor of a journal is a metric which demonstrates the number of citations that papers in the journal typically receive over a given period, usually two or five years. You can see how to calculate it over on Wikipedia.
Impact factor is a very quick way to assess journals. If the impact factor is very low, it likely means that either no one is reading the research or they don’t find it useful in progressing the field.
Papers which get cited many times indicate a lot of research activity and impact in the research community. Therefore journals which publish the kinds of paper receiving a lot of attention are indicative of high impact research.
How do you find the impact factor of a journal?
You can usually find the impact factor for a journal displayed prominently somewhere on its website. For example here is the homepage for the Journal of Orthopaedic Research:
If it’s not on the homepage, it may be on the ‘About’ page. If it’s not there I’d go back to my search engine (Ecosia) and likely end up finding it on Wikipedia.
What’s important to highlight is that constituents a “good” impact factor varies by research field. It’s not really appropriate to compare the impact factor of journals you’re trying to publish in with a friend if they work in a different discipline. What you can do though is compare the journal to others in the same field, which brings us on to quartiles:
Journal Quartiles
Research activity differs between fields, which plays a part in how many citations a paper will typically achieve.
My experience: I used to work in anaesthetics research. There are very few academic departments even researching anaesthetics. Looking up the impact factor of top anaesthetics journals, none look impressive because there simply isn’t much activity and therefore new papers coming out of the field!
A useful metric to judge the quality of journals is to determine which quartile a given journal sits within relative to all other journals in that field. Q1 journals mean that they’re in the top 25% highest impact for that field. Q2 journals sit between 25-50% and so on.
This means that a given journal may not appear active compared to other fields, but could actually be one of the best within your field.
How do you find out which quartile a journal sits in?
Use the SJR to compare journals in a given field. Shown below are the results for journal Marine Chemistry.
The big green box at the top shows that the journal is consistently in the top quartile across four fields:
Don’t be demoralised if even the top journals in your field have a relatively low impact factor.
What is important is that you’re trying to make your work high impact within your own field. That is what quartiles can demonstrate. You put yourself in a strong position if you’re trying to publish in Q1 journals in your field, no matter the impact factor.
My experience: When I was applying for PhDs, my soon-to-be supervisor instructed me to highlight in my application the quartiles of papers I’d co-authored. Without doing so, anyone unfamiliar with the field can’t easily assess the potential quality of the journal and therefore the potential impact of my research contribution.
Impact factor and quartiles are useful, but are not the only factors to consider.
Want your work to be highly cited? It is possible that a lower impact journal, which is highly targeted to your specialism, could get your article read by more people who are likely to build on and reference your work.
Relevance to the audience
Your choice of journal will, to a certain degree, dictate the audience who will see your paper. One of the main factors to consider is the type of journal:
Specialist vs Multi-Disciplinary Journals
There are two main types of journals. The first type are journals which serve a specialist field, for example Cancer or Additive Manufacturing.
These journals will often be the obvious target for your research, particularly if you’re working neatly in one field. This means that the people who are most likely to want to implement your findings can easily find it.
Other types of journals exist which are not targeted to a certain field. These instead accept a much wider spectrum of research. Examples include: PLOS One and Nature Scientific Reports.
You could chose to publish in a multi-disciplinary journal if your work:
- Covers work across several fields and wouldn’t neatly fit into a specialised journal
- May be widely applied and would be of interest to researchers across multiple fields
Of course at the top of the tree for multi-disciplinary journals are the likes of Nature, Science and the Lancet. The work published in these journals is usually very high impact and attracts huge readerships.
Even so, your work won’t necessarily always be seen by researchers working in your area of research. This could in fact decrease potential citations if you don’t explicitly spell out the potential impact and applications of your research.
Special Issues
Every so often journals will publish Special Issues which focus on a certain topic. For example here are the recent special issues for Cell:
If you can find a special issue which relates closely to your work you’re in a great position:
- You stand a better chance than usual of it being accepted, because the editor will better appreciate your work.
- Readers will already be primed for your work since they are very interested in the sub-field. As such, special issues will usually receive a higher average number of citations compared to standard issues in the journal.
My experience: Recently I published two papers in the same special issue of a journal. The special issue theme related very closely with a lot of my PhD so was an ideal target.
Do be aware that unlike with normal paper submission, you’ll be working towards a publishing deadline for that specific journal issue.
If you submit your work pretty late in the publishing window (like I did), you might be working to pretty tight deadlines which can become stressful, trust me!
You can find calls for special issues on the journal website or by following researchers in your field on social media.
Appropriateness of your study
This final point isn’t always as relevant as the others, but is worth considering. Effectively, the type of work you do, and associated study designs, may not always be appropriate for certain journals.
For example if you do computational modelling, even if your work is very relevant to a field perhaps you don’t have much chance publishing in a certain journal if they don’t usually accept that kind of work. In my field there is a journal that practically requires the inclusion of in vitro work for a paper to be considered.
The journal website will typically include a page detailing the kinds of topics they’ll publish:
This doesn’t necessarily tell you anything about what is acceptable in terms of methods, study design and experimentation though. For that I suggest looking at previously accepted papers. This will give a flavour of what is required to get accepted into a certain journal.
My advice for deciding where to publish your PhD research
Where are similar papers published?
If you don’t already have a journal in mind, think of the papers which relate most to your work: where were they published? The field may well have developed since then, so also look at recent related papers and see where they’re published too. These are usually great journals to consider submitting your paper to, since they publish related research.
Put together a list of potential journals
Once you’ve got an idea of potential journals, write a list in preferential order. Where would you most like your paper to be accepted?
Typically when putting together an ordered list of potential journals to submit work to, a researcher may first start with a submission to the one with the highest impact factor (typically the most prestigious) and then work their way down the list if they get rejected.
My experience: I’ve had three first author papers accepted from my PhD, and another is currently under review. Of the three which have been accepted, two were accepted at the first choice journal and the other was accepted at the second choice. The one which is still under review is at its third journal and still isn’t accepted!
Try to not be afraid of rejection, and certainly don’t take it personally!
Consider aiming high
You can always try your luck at a higher impact journal than other similar papers. Even though it may be more competitive, if it doesn’t take long to try it may be worth a shot, especially if your paper can be easily adapted to fit the journal’s formatting requirements.
My experience: In my field, most of the top journals have impact factors of 3, 4 or at most 5. Earlier this year I sent something to Nature Biomedical Engineering which has a much wider scope and an impact factor of over 17. The paper was rejected but from submission the decision only took a week. This isn’t a lot of time to lose if you think your paper stands a chance of acceptance. I was disappointed but at least we could move on quickly.
Stay positive
I appreciate that working out where to publish your PhD research can be overwhelming, especially for your first paper. It is worth persevering, trust me!
In relation to prestige, if you’re working in a field where the typical impact factor of a journal isn’t particularly high, please don’t get at all discouraged if you’re tempted to compare it to friends in other disciplines. I personally know I’m unlikely to publish in any of the very highest impact journals (with my research anyway), but that doesn’t mean I don’t do useful research!
It’s always worth remembering that the reason we’re trying to publish is to get our research out into the world. This helps to inform further research and helps to progress the field .
Best of luck!
I hope you found this article in the publishing series useful. Next in the series we’ll be putting together a first draft. If you have any feedback please do let me know.
