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KIN217 - Quality of Scholarly Journals

 

Lesson 3. Journal quality

Even in the realm of scholarly publishing you will find journals of varying qualities.  Two of the main concepts to understand in evaluating journal quality are peer review and journal impact factor.

Peer Reviewed Journals

"Peer review" (or "refereed") is the system through which the value of scientific research is judged.  It refers to the policy of having experts in the field examine and critique an article before it is accepted for publication. The process is 'blind' for both the reviewers and the authors. A peer reviewed journal strives to publish high quality, original studies which contribute significant ideas or experiments to the academic discipline.  Both original research articles and review articles will undergo the peer review process before publication in a scholarly journal.

3 Tools for Identifying Peer Reviewed Journals:

  1. Some journal indexes, such as Scopus and PubMed/MEDLINE, only include references to peer reviewed journal articles.  Other journal indexes may (but do not always) indicate whether a journal article is peer reviewed. This feature is especially important for journal indexes which include non-scholarly journals, such as CINAHL or SPORTDiscus.
  2. A journal's website will contain information about editors, article submission requirements, and whether or not articles undergo peer review.  For example, see the Publishing with Us webpage for the journal, Science.
  3. Check the journal title in the Ulrich's Periodicals Directory.  Ulrich's is a reference tool which provides basic information on thousands of journals and has a field for a journal's refereed (or peer reviewed) status. Watch the Ulrich's video (a little out of date but the basics ideas still apply) (wmv) or (flash with captions) for a demonstration.

Journal Impact Factor

One of the means by which academics identify the top journals within a research discipline is by comparing journal impact factors. This numerical value attempts to measure the influence of the articles within a journal upon the research in a specific academic discipline.  In general, the higher the impact factor, the more important or reputable the journal. The journal impact factor generally reflects the average number of times a journal has been cited as compared to the number of citable works in that journal in the past two years.

Impact factors are published in Journal Citation Reports.  This database provides impact factors for over 7 500 scholarly journals and offers a means to compare and evaluate journals within a research discipline.  Impact factors should only be compared for journals in the same subject area or discipline. 

Though impact factors are currently being used to evaluate the quality and influence of scholarly journals, there is some controversy over the value of this process.  Journals can try to increase their impact factor through a variety of means such as publishing review articles which tend to be cited more often than research articles or frequently citing articles within the same journal.  A further description of the impact factor and some of the criticisms of its use are available in the Wikipedia article "Impact Factor".