Information Guides: Publishing and Scholarship Guide: Reach & Visibility

Introduction

One of the main principles of scholarship is that it's part of a conversation. Researchers want to share their findings for others to respond and build on them. Therefore, visibility should be important in selecting a journal for publication.

This page shares suggestions on how to determine a journal's visibility.

Journal Statistics

Journals will refer to different statistical values to indicate their reputation. You may want to consider these as well in determining where to publish. These statistics also may factor into evaluating a journal's visibility.

Journal Impact Factor:

The journal impact factor is a measure of a journal's impact. It measures the frequency that a typical article is cited during a particular period of time. While the raw number can demonstrate a journal's popularity, it's also useful for comparing journals in the same subject area. We do not subscribe to the tool that lists the journal impact factor but many journals will share that information on their "about" page.

Altmetrics:

Altmetrics is an alternative measurement of the impact of an article. It takes into account online and social media mentions of a particular article or even a part of an article.

The links below offer other tools to measure a journal or article's impact.

Scimago Journal & Country Rank
Uses data in the Scopus database to measure the impact of journal articles and scholarly output by country.
Elsevier Journal Metrics
This measures three different factors including Scimago, SNIP and % of articles cited.
Eigenfactor
Measures how often an article published in the past five years appeared in the official JCR journal impact factor list in a year.
Metrics Toolkit
This website offers a description of different metrics and how they're calculated. This is a learning tool. You won't find actual metrics on this page.
Google Scholar Metrics
Google Scholar Metrics provide an easy way for authors to quickly gauge the visibility and influence of recent articles in scholarly publications

Indexing

Databases:

Library databases are made up of articles published in journals indexed by that particular database. The journal index is put together based on subject or publication similarities.

Articles appearing in a database have a greater chance of being discovered. They also may be of higher quality since the journals must go through an evaluation process before a database decides to include them.

Discovering If A Journal Is Indexed:

Most journals will indicate where the journal is indexed on their web page if it is indexed.

Some databases also provide a list of journals indexed by their database or you can search the database to see if a journal is indexed. Here's how to explore the publications indexed in NWHSU databases.

National Library of Medicine/PubMed

You can search for journals in the National Library of Medicine Catalog. The catalog gives information about the journal, including if it's indexed in Medline (PubMed)

EBSCO Databases
Academic Search Premiere, CINAHL, AltHealthWatch

To see the publications indexed in EBSCO databases, go to the database and click on the Publications link in the top left.

OVID Databases
AMED, Medline

In the advanced search bar, select journal as the filter and search for the title or abbreviation in the search bar.