Choosing to Publish Open Access
Open access is a means of taking advantage of the global reach and relative inexpense of internet publishing to make peer-reviewed scholarly content freely available.
- Open Access Research Guide includes information about transformative agreements, open access publishers and repositories, predatory publishing, USC Open Access Task Force.
Impact Factors
The impact factor of a particular journal can be looked up through the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) database. The journal impact factor is a measure of the frequency with which the "average article" in a journal has been cited in a particular year. The impact factor will help you evaluate a journal's relative popularity or importance* when compared to others in the same field. * Impact factors are not without controversy and does not necessarily denote article or journal quality.
Impact Factors, and other measures of scholarly impact provides more information about the nuances and biases inherent in the system
- JANE (Journal/Author Name Estimator)Jane first searches for the 50 articles that are most similar to your input*. For each of these articles, a similarity score between that article and your input is calculated. The Article Influence (AI) measures how often articles in the journal are cited within the first five years after its publication. These citations are weighted based the influence of the journals from which citations are received, also known as the Eigenfactor.
- SCImago Journal RankingThe SCImago Journal & Country Rank is a publicly available portal that includes the journals and country scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus® database (Elsevier B.V.). These indicators can be used to assess and analyze scientific domains. Journals can be compared or analysed separately.
- Web of Science This link opens in a new windowInterdisciplinary collection of journal articles, conference proceedings, and books. Collection of seven online database: Conference Proceedings Citation Index, Science Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index, Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Index Chemicus, Current Chemical Reactions, and Book Citation Index. Coverage is 1900-present.
The newest edition of JCR is the default option and is a year behind the current year. You can search for a specific journal or subject area. Since impact factors vary widely by discipline, it is helpful to get a baseline for your discipline by searching for subject area first. Impact factor data is only available for journals indexed by Web of Science.
The default display is organized alphabetically by journal title, changing the option to Impact Factor will rank the journals from most impact to least. Clicking on a journal title will provide additional details about the calculation. Web of Science will provide the Journal Impact Factor for the current year, the 5 year impact factor, the immediacy index, the journal half-life, and Eigenfactor scores.
Learn more by taking the Scholarly Impact Challenge!
Google Scholar Metrics
Google Scholar Metrics allow authors to view the visibility and influence of recent articles in scholarly publications. Scholar Metrics summarizes recent citations to many publications and help authors as they consider where to publish their new research.
Within Google Scholar select the three horizontal lines for Settings, then select Metrics. This will take you to Top publications - English. Choose the VIEW ALL link for more options. Select the dropdown arrow to see Categories, Health & Medical Sciences was selected, then choose the sub-category, Nursing has been selected in the example below.
You can also view publications in different languages by selecting the dropdown arrow next to English.