Publishing in Credible Journals and disseminating Research to different Audiences

1. Publishing in Credible Journals and
Disseminating Research to Different Audiences
Dr Sheila Kaka Ochugboju – Research Capacity Advisor
The Training Centre in Communication (TCC)

2. OUTLINE OF PRESENTATION
1Introduction – history of scholarly publishing
2Why do you want to get published?
3.What are credible journals?
4. Advice on predatory journals
6. Reaching new audiences

3. BRIEF HISTORY OF SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING - 1
 1323: Compagnie du Gai Sçavoir, the oldest learned society on record, is
founded in Toulouse, France.
 1660: The Royal Society of London is founded.
 1665: Journal des Sçavans and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society of London are first published. Each journal used some form of peer
review, although not exactly like today’s version. Philosophical Transactions
published famous scientists such as Newton, Hooke, van Leeuwenhoek,
Faraday, and Darwin.
 1731: Medical Essays and Observations, the first fully peer-reviewed journal,
is launched by the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
 1743: The American Philosophical Society, the first scholarly society in what is
now the US, is created.

4. BRIEF HISTORY OF SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING - 2
 1848: The American Association for the Advancement of Science is founded.
AAAS publishes the journal Science and is the largest general scientific
society in the world.
 1869: Nature publishes its first issue.
 1880: Science publishes its first issue.
 1947: Elsevier, the longtime publishing giant, launches its first international
journal, Biochimica et Biophysica Acta.
 1990: Postmodern Culture becomes the first online-only journal with no
printed version available.
 1991: arXiv, the science pre-print server, is launched.

5. BRIEF HISTORY OF SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING - 3
 2003: The Public Library of Science (PLOS) is founded.
 2006: PLOS ONE, the wildly successful open access megajournal, begins
publishing. As of December 2011, PLOS ONE was publishing 70 articles per
day!
 2010: The altmetrics manifesto, describing potential new ways to gauge the
impact of research beyond citations and impact factors, is written.
 2012: Several innovative new journals, including F1000 Research, PeerJ,
and eLife, are launched. These new journals are experimenting with new
forms of peer review, new business models, and new funding sources.

6. WHY DO YOU WANT TO GET PUBLISHED?
To improve your job, promotion and overall career prospects
In 2005, physicist Jorge E. Hirsch developed a simple
premise to quantify the scientific output of an individual
researcher.
“I propose the index h, defined as the number of papers with
citation number ≤ h, as a useful index to calculate the
scientific output of a researcher” (Hirsch, 2005).

7. MEASURING YOUR H-INDEX
 H-index is, for a given researcher, the number h of publications that are cited
at least h times each in academic journals.
 Scopus - multi-disciplinary citation database of peer-reviewed literature with
tools to track, analyze and visualize research
 Web of Science - use the Author Finder option to search this multi-
disciplinary citation database of peer-reviewed literature with tools to track,
analyze and visualize research
 Google Scholar Citations - provides a simple way to check who is citing your
publications and graph citations over time
PROBLEMS
X work’s first citation can take years
X Citation measures are narrow
X influential work may remain uncited
X The metrics are narrow
X They neglect impact outside the academy,
X Ignore the context and reasons for citation.

8. WHAT ARE CREDIBLE JOURNALS?

9. THE BIG ISSUES?
The credibility of a journal may be built up over time due to three key factors:
 PEER REVIEW PROCESS?
 Is it fair and does it help eliminate bias – race, gender, institution?
 Are manuscripts anonymized?
 CITATION INDICES?
 The advent of the Science Citation Index (SCI) in 1963 has allowed measuring
something called the impact factor of an article by looking at how papers are
cited over a certain period of time.
 CORE JOURNALS?
 Since the invention of Bradford's Law in librarianship, in 1933, the notion of
core journals has become ever more prominent.
 How do we deal with issues of prestige, authority and visibility now in an online
world?

10. BUILDING CREDIBILITY
The credibility of a journal may be assessed by examining several key factors:
 PRESTIGE
 Tied to tradition and the prestige of the evaluators of the journal themselves?
 Are manuscripts anonymized?
 AUTHORITY
 This is built up by the rigour of the editorial boards and process.
 It can be built over time
 VISIBILITY
 This is a function of prestige and technology
 Good bibiliographies, translations, distribition, promotion etc can all help
make an average journal more visible

11. WHAT ARE CREDIBLE JOURNALS? - 1
The credibility of a journal may be assessed by examining several key factors:
 Where is it indexed?
 Is the journal included in the major databases for the field?
 Are its articles discoverable where the journal claims – archiving issues?
 What is its publishing history?
 How long has the journal been available?
 For new journals, is the journal mission clearly available?
 Is it supported by a reputable publisher or scholarly society?
 Is it peer-reviewed?
 How long does the peer review process take?
 Is this a reasonable time frame for a quality assessment?

12. WHAT ARE CREDIBLE JOURNALS? - 2
 What is its IMPACT FACTOR?
 The Impact Factor is a measurement of average citations recieved over a
two year period. Does the journal have an impact factor?
 If not, are other measurements available to determine if scholars are reading
and citing articles from this journal?
The Impact Factor is a statistical measure used to compare journals in a
given field.
Calculation is based on the average number of times articles published in a
journal over the previous two years were cited in the current year.
Impact Factors are calculated for some 7000 journals in many fields and
published each year as the Journal Citation Report.

13. DO YOU CARE ABOUT YOUR IMPACT FACTOR?
 YES? Then you have to know and follow the rules of the insider circles and
rope teams that cite each other to improve journal impact. Or, the journal
may use other means of improving the IF (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor#Editorial_policies_that_affect_the_i
mpact_factor ).

 There are different approaches to measuring the impact of an author,
though. One of those being altmetrics - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altmetrics
- based on article level citations and not on those of a whole journal.
 To make the case more complicated (might be necessary), journal editors
and researchers have recently joined to fight the IF altogether as a biased
number that simply does not work to assess an individual's contribution

14. NEW IDEAS AROUND THE IMPACT FACTOR?
 The journal impact factor (JIF), developed by Eugene Garfield as a tool to
monitor the adequacy of coverage of the Science Citation Index (SCI), is
probably the most widely used bibliometric indicator in the scientific,
scholarly and publishing community. However, its extensive use for
purposes for which it was not designed has raised a series of criticisms, all
aiming to adapt the measure to the new user needs.
 Two journal metrics recently endorsed by Elsevier’s Scopus: SCImago
Journal Rank (SJR) and Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP). SJR
weights citations according to the status of the citing journal and aims to
measure journal prestige rather than popularity
 It presents the main features of the two indicators, comparing them one with
another, and with a journal impact measure similar to Thomson Reuters’
journal impact factor (JIF).

15. PREDATORY OR OPEN ACCESS (OA) JOURNALS
 Open Access (OA) 'predatory' journals are now part of the scholarly
communication landscape. Although the majority of new journals are
legitimate, the credentials of some are questionable.
 Such journals and publishers are referred to as 'predatory’ because they
commonly send spam emails to potential authors, solicit submissions and
request payment of article processing charges, but lack any discernible
scholarship, academic rigour or credibility. Authors should not use such
journals.
 There is now more research done and more research papers published than
ever before. There are currently approximately 28,000 journals publishing
1.5 million papers annually.
 About eLife http://elifesciences.org/about - watch video
http://elifesciences.org/about#process
 About http://f1000research.com - Watch Video http://f1000research.com/about

16. HOW TO CHECK PREDATORY JOURNALS - 1
Key indicators of the legitimacy of newly launched OA journals are:
 Entry in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) – journals must
meet strict criteria to qualify
 Publisher’s membership of Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association
(OASPA) – members are bound by a code of conduct based on standard
publishing practices and transparency
 Publisher’s membership of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) –
membership demonstrates commitment to widely accepted publishing
practices
 Refer to Beall's List of Predatory Publishers and Journals-
http://scholarlyoa.com/2012/12/06/bealls-list-of-predatory-publishers-2013/ ).
Beall focuses on Open Access publishers that claim big spending for
reviewing and publication processes and want you to compensate them.

17. HOW TO CHECK PREDATORY JOURNALS - 2
 Publisher’s membership of the International Association of Scientific,
Technical & Medical Publishers (STM) – membership demonstrates
commitment to widely accepted publishing practices
 Named editor and editorial board – recognised experts in their field who
include their editorial commitment on their own research profiles
 Full contact details (email, postal address, working telephone number)
 Visibility of costs associated with publishing
 Legitimate journals acknowledge their newly formed status and do not
attempt to feign reputation by referring to false Impact Factors or inclusion of
content in indexing and abstracting services

18. REACHING NEW AUDIENCES
 Audience Mapping – Primary, Secndary & Tertiary
 Key message development – for each target group
 Strategy for engagement – by yourself, with your institution or with other
partnerships/consortia
 Using digital platforms to amplify reach – social media, online learning
platforms and libraries
 Maintaining your integrity – Monitoring your reach and impact using about
Altmetrics

19. MAPPING NEW AUDIENCES USING ALTMETRICS
 ALTMETRICS CROWDSOURCES PEER REVIEW
 MORE RESEARCH IS MOVING ONLINE TO NON
TRADITIONAL MEDIA AND ITS IMPACT NEEDS TO BE
TRACKED ALSO

20. THE GMO STORY

22. THANK YOU – ASANTE SANA