It is crucial to publish an article in a journal that is credible as one way of enhancing personal experience and recognition at the workplace. Publishing a journal article helps faculty members to meet their promotion requirements and enhance credibility and reputation of the researcher, institutions and even a country at large. Some of the universities require their faculty members and students to publish journal articles regularly; this results to pressure on scholars to publish a journal article. The resultant pressure has been blamed for a variety of practices that do not meet ethical practices.
The talk about predatory journals has been intensified. Authors are advised to publish a journal article in credible sites and try as much as possible to avoid predatory sites. Do you know ways of analyzing publication sites in order to avoid predation in article publishing? Below are the definition predatory journals and ways of avoiding predatory journals.
Predatory journals
Predatory publishing implies authors being charged fees for publication, but editors fail to check articles for legitimacy and quality. This means that predatory journals who publish a journal article do not provide the other editorial publishing services associated with legitimate journals. Thus, it is important to ensure that the site with which you publish does not fall into the category of predatory journals by looking at the following aspects:
- Journal Indexing
Check if the journal is indexed. Majority of the databases and index service do include only legitimate, high quality journals. If the website of the journal that you want to publish a journal article with has a list of names of indexes and abstracts that include the journal, confirm by searching in the indexes they have provided.
- Analyze the Journal Metrics
One best basis of analyzing journal metrics is by checking their impact factors. However, this is sometimes tricky because predatory journals list completely fictitious factors. You need to explore various options of identifying if journal websites’ impact factors are actually what they claim to be. You can use Journal Citation Reports and SCIMago Journal and County Rankings to ascertain if the journal website’s metrics are true before you select it to publish a journal article in it.
- Check the number of citation counts on some individual papers
It is advisable that you publish a journal article in websites that are more accessible and known so that your work can get even more citations. You can sample several articles and check the citation counts of each. To achieve this, you can use the Web of Science or Google Scholar. The rationale of this is to ensure that the articles published in the journal are being cited by other scholars in your field. If all or most of the articles are not cited elsewhere for articles that were published a few years ago implies that such a journal does not publish high quality journals.
- Beall’s List
Jeffrey Beal prepared a list of scholarly open access publishers and publications that are potentially problematic. He warned scholars to avoid these journals whenever they want to publish a journal article. Although the lost has faced widespread controversy across place and time, it has really contributed to identifying potential predatory journals when used in conjunction with other sources of information. You only need to search a specific journal in the search bar of the website that bears the list and see if the journal website in which you want to publish a journal article is included.
- Soliciting
Most predatory journals tend to solicit articles from scholars to publish for them. However, Open Access publishers may send a notice to you, offering to publish a journal article for you, but this does not extend to direct email solicitations; these are not typically used by legitimate publishers. Avoid publishing a journal article with solicitors.
- Copyright Transfer Requirement
If a given publisher requires that you submit your article after you have transferred your copyright, it means you have to do the assignment of investigating the journal further.
- Payment of Processing Charge before submission
Legitimate journal publishers require a person intending to publish a journal to pay for the processing fee after acceptance. If a journal strictly requires to pay before acceptance of a journal article, that should act as a red flag. Payments should be asked for after the manuscript has been submitted, reviewed and corrections made in readiness for publishing.
From the above seven factors, it is evident that you can publish a journal article in a site that that is not legitimate, reducing the impact of your work in the scholarly world. Therefore, there is need to be vigilant before you submit your work for publishing. You should make sure that the journal website you choose to publish a journal article with is highly credible and does not provide evidence of the aspects that have been identified above.
While there has been a series of warnings regarding predatory journals, there is a tendency of linking all new journal publishers as merely predatory; this is not true in all cases. There are a variety of new publishers that are rapidly coming up and labelling them predatory is not a way to go. As a scholar, you have a responsibility to critically assess all journal sites to ascertain that a selected site can publish a journal article for you. Take time to download some of the published articles and go through them to check if they were actually properly worked on before they were published.
Having been aware of these important elements of scholarly publishing, you are called upon to publish and make an impact in the world of academics. You need to ensure that you meet all the quality requirements of publishing before you publish a journal article. The higher the quality of your journal, the more the readers will seek your work. This will not only impact the world of academia, but will also position you in a place you can easily tap opportunities in the environment. If you need further assistance particularly how to publish a journal article, do not hesitate to get in touch with us for further help.