Demonstrate Your Impact: Where to Publish?

Before deciding where you want to publish, it will be helpful for you to reflect on why you want to publish. Do you want to:

• Get a publication out/bullet point on your CV?
• Reach a certain community or audience?
• Make the information as available to as wide an audience as possible?
• Get promotion/tenure?
• Gain prestige?
• Gain experience publishing and writing academic articles?

Now reflect on your answers. From them, what do you value most and what do you value least?

None of the answers on this list are wrong, and at any given point in your career they will be different. Depending on the answers to your questions and how you rank them will influence in what direction you go for publishing. For example, if it is more important to you to get your article out on the open and as readily available as possible, you might consider pursuing publication in an open access journal. If you are more interested in honing in on a particular audience, find a journal that is widely read by that community. If you are interested in the prestige, maybe consider attempting to publish in a "high impact" journal.

When selecting a potential journal in which to publish consider the following:

• Is the journal indexed in search tools such as Web of Science, Academic Search, etc? (i.e. can people find it using search tools to read and build upon your work?)
• What might be the publication timeline for you?
• Does the scope of the journal match your interests? Does the type of publication they seek fit with what you want to write or what you've already written? (e.g. methods articles, reflective/theoretical articles, etc)
• Does the journal reach the readers with whom you'd like to communicate?

(Publish or Perish collage art by user hogret on Deviantart.com, Image used courtesy of DeviantArt user hogret.)

Tools and Considerations in Evaluating a Journal