How do you judge the quality of a journal?

Question

A colleague and I recently submitted a paper to a journal with an impressive-sounding name, the "International Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Computational Research". According to their website,

IJAICR is a referred [sic] journal in the field of computer science, artificial intelligence and soft computing methods.

It was accepted two days after we submitted it. That's too fast. We were suspicious. Although the journal said that all papers are peer-reviewed, we could not see how that was done in two days. Plus, we received no comments from the reviewers. Also, the submission guidelines didn't ask for a "blind" copy (without our names or any references to who we were).

But wait, there's more.

The acceptance letter asked us to send them US$300 to publish it. We did not. We've withdrawn our submission and will submit a new version of the paper to a more reputable journal in the coming months.

How might we make a better choice of respectable journals before we submit next time?

Answer 1

The way I usually choose journals is by looking at where people I trust/follow publish, and where previous work was published. It is usually not too hard to compare the quality your work to the quality of the work you are citing, and chose a target based on that. Unless your field is highly mutli-disciplinary, you will see the same journals/conferences popping up again and again in your references; submit to one of those.

Before submitting, however, it is always important to look at a few articles from previous issues. This will give you a second gauge of quality for the journal and also let you pick up on any formatting and presentations quirks that might be present in the publication.

Answer 2

You may want to check that the publisher is not on Beall's List of Predatory, Open-Access Publishers.

Surprisingly, the publisher in question is not. I've found Beall's list to be fairly comprehensive, but the vanity press industry seems to be booming.

Caveat: that list is just one guy's opinion. But it resonates with my own experience.

Answer 3

The best way is by word-of-mouth: ask around the department, ask your PhD advisor, ask people you've worked with.

If it is a specialist journal, and you are a specialist, then the next best way is to look at the previously published issues of the journal and see what kinds of articles they accept.

Failing that, the Australian Government's Research Council puts out a ranking of journals and conferences every now and then. It is not perfect, but should give a rough idea of where a journal places in the eyes of the bureaucrats :-). Note that "new" journals (journals that have not been active for more than X years) are not ranked, so omission from the list does not necessarily mean that the journal itself is not worthwhile.

Answer 4

"How do you judge the quality of a journal?"

One answer is already known to you: Submit a paper to it and see how it responds. I once submitted a few papers to an online journal (no print equivalent) and the referee reports that I got clearly showed that they read and understood the paper and that they knew the subject well. They even suggested ways how the paper could be improved. The quality of the referees reflect the quality of the journal.

Answer 5

For some hard data I like eigenfactor, because I think there methodology makes a lot of sense. The default settings are a bit odd, you want the AI score not EF score. I also like the "eigenfactor category" under advanced search better than the "ISI category" that you can get on the main page. Certainly it's better to have a more in-depth understanding, but also sometimes you just want a quick ballpark guesstimate of how good the journal is, and eigenfactor does that.

Answer 6

First of all, I look at the publisher. If you don' find a lot of references to the publisher on the web, it is suspicious.

Then, I look at the editor in chief, and at the board of editors. If you don't find many big names here, this is again very suspicious.

Finally, google the journal name and look who is publishing in the journal. Most of the time it becomes clear if the journal is serious or not.

Answer 7

"How do you judge the quality of a journal?"

Look at the editorial / advisory board. They've gotta be from the top schools or they've gotta be top researchers.

Answer 8

Look at the journals responsible for the references you cite in your own manuscript. Upside, these are the journals publishing relevant and credible work in your area. Downside, there are plenty perfectly good journals that are newer, or less specialized, and so might be missed.

BTW, a very fast review time with no reviews is suspicious. But charging an article processing charge (APC) is not, in itself, a reason for worry. That said, do look to see that you are getting the full open access you pay for if there is an APC (i.e. no transfer of copyright to the publisher and the article is released under a CC-BY license). You can search for copyright policies by journal or publisher here: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/

Answer 9

I'm surprised nobody mentioned this yet, so I'm adding it as a separate answer:

Read some articles from the journal (in your subfield), and see how they feel like

When you look at a journal and check that the 5 or 6 latest articles in your domain are of the meh type, you probably don't want to publish there. If they make you feel “oh, I never quite thought of that, it's clever… I see how I may use it”, go for it!

Answer 10

The Journal Ranking site (www.journal-ranking.com) aims to rank many (11K) journals, according to their measure of impact (mainly number of citation, but weighted according to the ranking of the citing journal), number of articles, etc. It also let you sort by field.

But again, this is only their point of view, and their way of measuring quality.

(and it only ranks journals listed in the ISI's SCI)