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Environmental Science and Environmentalism

Evaluate Journals & Publish Your Research

This brief guide introduces faculty to some popular journal metrics, and related resources to help faculty evaluate scholarly journals in their discipline of research, avoid "predatory journals", and publish their research in high impact journals. Most helpful is the CSI-subscribed resource, CABELLS Scholarly Analytics, a complete source for journal information, evaluation metrics such as Impact Factor, and submission details. CABELLS also provides a Journal Blacklist: a list of likely deceptive and predatory academic journals to keep researchers protected from exploitative operations, as well as a Journal Whitelist: a searchable database of over 11,000 journals covering 18 disciplines.

Journal Metrics

Journal metrics are often used to identify key journals in a research field.  This identification can be useful when faculty consider which journals to submit their manuscripts to for publication.

The Impact Factor is the most familiar metric in academia. Available in Journal Citation Reports and other citation analysis tools, impact factors serve as indicators of the impact, or influence of a journal.  Even though CSI no longer subscribes to JCR, CABELLS, a newly designed resource subscribed by CSI, provides impact factor. Though controversial, Impact Factors, which rank journals within a discipline, are extensively used in the sciences. 

The producers of JCR caution users not to depend solely on citation data in journal evaluations. "Citation data are not meant to replace informed peer review. Careful attention should be paid to the many conditions that can influence citation rates..."  Informed and careful use of impact data, and a good understanding of the limitations of the various metrics is essential. check out the various resources listed below.

Library Resources: Cabells Scholarly Analytics

 
CABELLS Scholarly Analytics is a complete source for journal information, evaluation metrics, and submission details for faculty.  It provides journal impact factor (new), acceptance rate, review process, topic(s) of articles, manuscript guidelines, type of reader, publication and contact information for over 11,000 journals in 18 disciplines including economics and finance. CABELLS has a Journal Blacklist, a list of likely deceptive and predatory academic journals, as well as a Journal Whitelist, a searchable database of over 11,000 journals.

Internet Resources

Eigenfactor.org  offers two ways to rank journals: by "Eigenfactor" or by "Article Influence".  You can obtain Eigenfactor Score and Article Influence Score of a particular journal in Journal Citation Reports database, or Search on Eigenfactor.org website. Eigenfactor.org ranks the influence of journals much as Google’s PageRank algorithm ranks the influence of web pages.  The Eigenfactor® score of a journal is an estimate of the percentage of time that library users spend with that journal (see Eigenfactor.org for details).

SCImago Journal Ranking is a weighted metric, similar to the Eigenfactor Score.  The freely accessible web site contains rankings of more than 20,000 journals from the Scopus database, one of the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature, covering the fields of science, technology, medicine, social sciences and arts & humanities.  The website offers an easy interface for searching and comparing within subject categories.

Google Scholar provides Top 100 Publications by citation count. The Scholar Metrics ranks journals based on an H-Index score. To explore specific research areas, select one of the broad areas on the left colume of the website, click on the "Subcategories" link and then select one of the options (e.g.: Humanities, LIterature and Arts > Subcategories > Drama & Theater Arts).  Google Scholar Metrics  provide an easy way for authors to quickly gauge the visibility and influence of recent articles in scholarly publications, and to help authors as they consider where to publish their research.