Strategic publishing

Deciding which journal is the best place to publish your work will involve many different factors: audience, research area, need or desire to publish open access, among many other concerns.

There are a number of tools you can use when you have a list of preferred titles to help determine which might offer better chance of impact. This would never guarantee that your work would get citations, but you can see which journals might have more publications in the past that have received citations. This could indicate that the publication is well regarded by the discipline.

Listed below are a number of journal comparison resources available

Scopus Compare Journals is a tool to analyse and compare journal performance across a range of citation metrics. The information in Compare Journals is derived from citation data in Scopus (Elsevier). Up to 10 journals can be compared. 

Compare Journals calculates:

• CiteScore is based on the number of citations to documents (articles, reviews, conference papers, book chapters and data papers) in a journal over four years, divided by the number of the same document types indexed in Scopus and published in the same four years by that journal.
• SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper) is a ratio between the “Raw Impact per Paper”, a type of Citations per Publication calculation, actually received by the journal, compared to the “Citation Potential”, or expected Citations per Publication, of that journal’s field.
• SJR (SCImago Journal Rank) is a prestige metric, whose methodology is similar to that of Google PageRank. It weights the value of a citation depending on the field, quality and reputation of the journal that the citation comes from, so that “all citations are not equal”.

Use the SciVal Scopus Source Benchmarking Report to compare 10 Scopus Sources and generate a report. 

Sign into SciVal by creating an account or use your Scopus credentials. Select the Overview module and click on the Scopus Sources option the bottom icon on the left. 

Search for a known title by clicking on Add Scopus Source. Click on the title and details about the publication will load in the main panel. This title will form the basis of the report. 

Click on Report from Template (top right) and select Scopus Source Benchmarking Report. Populate the report with more titles under Scopus Sources by typing in title keywords. Drag and drop up to 9 more selected titles into the box on the right. Click on Next step and change the report name if necessary.

Create the report. To view the report follow the link in the pop up window or go to the Reporting module. Parts of the report can be changed i.e. the date range and re-saved.

Export the report as a pdf file, save as a snapshot or share with a colleague. 

The report benchmarks the Scopus Sources on four metrics and provides an accompanying explanation.