Strategic publishing

Publishing your research for maximum impact and visibility involves thinking strategically about the audience for your research, selecting and evaluating appropriate journals or other sources. New and early researchers can develop contacts by consulting supervisors or research leaders and collaborate with other researchers. You will no doubt already be choosing to publish your research in outlets that are the best fit for your area of research. 

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.

Looking at Publications in Top Citation Percentiles and SNIPs for journals in your area is another factor to consider. If you haven’t looked at this until now, you may find new publishing outlets that are also well ranked.   

There are a number of tools you can use when you have a list of preferred titles to help determine which might offer a 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. 

The next section will show you how to use selection tools to create a publication short-list and compare the titles.

When selecting possible publication sources such as books and journals, consider and review:

• The potential or target audiences for your publication - who will read and cite your work
• Where the audience is located (national, international)
• Your timeframe for publishing
• Journals that you read or cite for your research, and their relevance to your proposed publication
• Frequency of journal issues per year or volume
• Author guidelines on journal websites
• If journal is indexed by Scopus or Web of Science (greatly increases discoverability)
• If publisher provides a unique Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
• Quality or impact of the journal (see Comparing journals)
• Open access publishing options (see Open access)
• Online tools for selecting journals (see Journal selection tools)
• Unethical and deceptive publishing practices (see Unethical publishing practices)

For more detail see the Royal Society Te Apārangi guidelines for Selecting a quality publisher