I’m starting to get a feel now as to exactly the various reputations of different journals in my field. However, I really have no idea for journals even a slight amount out of my field. There are some general guidelines for Computer Science as a whole, if it’s an ACM or IEEE journal, it’s likely to be fairly decent, If it’s a SIG<x> conference, then likewise. However, for areas far outside of my specialty, I really have no idea. Generally, they all tend to have fairly respectable sounding names but actually reading some of the papers that come out of them lead me to seriously question the quality of their peer review process.
So is there a global list out there that gives a general overview as to which journals contain generally reputable research and which ones tend to have laxer acceptance polcies?
I know of no such list. I have two quick suggestions. First, ask any Assistant Professor in your field, especially one at a good university. Tenure decisions depend in part on publications, and only publications in reputable conferences and journals. From my experience they know this stuff.
Second, if you can find a citation index of some sort, they may have conferences and journals cited the most. That’s a good indicator.
Even for IEEE conferences, the review process is not the same for all events, and the names of the events reflect this. Workshop papers get minimal review, since the intention is to share new information. Major conferences get more, and journals get the most, including the time for revision and re-review.
Check the sponsor. Many conferences are sponsored by for-profit entities. Paper sessions are just an adjunct to the exhibit floor, and may or may not be well reviewed. Things change over time. The Spring and Fall Joint Computer Conferences were very well respected, and merged into the National Computer Conference, which started good and went downhill until it died.
However, for profit journals published by Springer and Elsevier have very stringent review policies, so not all for-profit things are bad (just expensive!)
You can also go to the home page of the journal in question and check their submission guidelines. There are sometimes short cuts, though.
All in all, asking a professor in the field might be the best and easiest way of finding this out.
What do you want out of the paper? IEEE Computer Society magazines are designed to be accessible to a larger readership than transactions. ACM is the same way - I’ve heard JACM referred to as a write only publication.
All you need to find is one good journal in a field. Then, look through some papers in that journal, and see what journals they cite. Many of the cites will, of course, be to the same journal, but many of them will be to others. If you see one reputable journal frequently citing another, then that other journal is probably also reputable. You can also look at the authors of papers in that journal, and see what other journals they’ve published in: An author who publishes in one reputable journal probably publishes in others.
Interestingly enough, I’m submitting a paper today. Yesterday, my advisor pulled up a list of journals and chose the most highly ranked one that was applicable. Let me google and see if I can find it…it was ISP or IPS or something or another…
Impact factor is the variable that gets bandied around most often wrt journal quality, and is described in the link Digital Stimulus provides, you’ll be able to get a table of impact factors for all journals in your field from ISI. It can be useful, as long as you’re comparing apples to apples. Journals which publish a lot of reviews will have a high impact factor, for example, because reviews are generally highly cited. So its not particularly meaningful to compare the I.F. of a reviews journal to that of a communications journal. Similarly, a middle of the road journal that covers a whole field, embracing many sub-disciplines, can have a higher I.F. than an excellent journal dedicated to a narrower field.
Its surprising just how finely calibrated the scale of journal quality is in the heads of academics, most will be able to give you a detailed description of their take on journal pecking order. Speak to a few different people and you’ll soon get a handle on the prevailing opinions.
The problem is that I occasionally look a journals far outside of my interest, either for fun or because I need some obscure bit of information. Journals like Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology or American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. It’s hard to tell from first glance whether these are reputable journals or not.
And in these cases it’s not practical or important enough to actually talk to an academic about this. The ISI looks interesting but I don’t think I’ve seen a single place on the web that contain ISI rankings for every journal across all fields.
It’s not humanly possible to rank every journal across all fields. For starters, publishers are constantly launching new journals, and splitting or merging old ones. For another, some journals are so rarely cited, or publish so few articles, that there’s simply not enough data to calculate an impact factor.
If a journal is indexed by ISI, you can be certain it is well cited, and therefore is well regarded by researchers in the field. If it’s not indexed, then you have to look at other factors, some already mentioned: Is it sponsored by a professional society? Are the authors affiliated with good institutions, and do their acknowledgements mention respectable funding sources (NIH, NSF, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, disease charities)? Do the authors cite other, reputable journals, or do they tend to cite their own papers, and other papers in the same journal? (Self-citations is one way journals try to pump up their impact factors.)
I’m not asking for comprehensive reviews. But would it be possible to categorise them into,s ay 5 tiers?
Tier 1 journals are of broad ranging and international reputation. Like Science or Nature.
Tier 2 journals are considered the top in their field or sub-field and are generally considered the best place to publish your research. In my field, it would probably be IJCV and CVPR.
Tier 3 journals are still considered important research but would usually be considered distinctly less important than tier 2s.
Tier 4 journals still have some semblance of a peer review process and occasionally publish worthwhile research but are obscure tend not to get paid attention to by most people in the field.
Tier 5 journals are complete farces which will publish anything and should not be trusted.
I think it would be useful to classify it like this, mostly for the distinction between tier 2 and tier 3 journals as well as pointing out what tier 5 journals exist.