Hello, this is Emily and I'd like to welcome you to this uni-edit video.
How will the journal I publish in affect my academic career?
Publishing academic papers has many professional benefits including: being
able to estimate your individual research output, gaining collaborative
power, and diversifying your skills and expertise.
There are four main factors of the journal's ability to influence the status
of your paper. These factors can impact the status of your research profile. These factors include: impact factor, reach of the journal, accessibility or
open access, and collegiality, such as relationships with members of the
journal editorial board.
Impact factors our publication and readership metrics that ranks journals
within their field of research based on how often papers from that journal are
cited per year. Impact factors allow the scientific community to rank the
importance and impact of a journal in advancing research in its field.
Publishing in high impact factor journals (for example top-tier journals)
shows that your research is scientifically sound, novel, and
influential. Therefore, papers associated with these
journals improve your research profile and enhance your professional acumen. A
few examples of top-tier journals include Nature, Science, and Cell. Journals
will only consider accepting papers that are suited to their scope and readership.
This is an important criterion for both author and journal.
For the author, it ensures the author knows what type of audience the paper
aims to reach, and thus, whether the paper will be relevant. For the journal, having
a transparent and accessible scope ensures submitted content is relevant
and that the journals audience receives relevant material, which also minimizes
the administrative costs of processing a large number of submissions.
Accessibility is the ability of others to have access to information and to be
able to pass on scientific knowledge.
Publishing papers in open access journals not only disseminate scientific
knowledge more widely, but it broadens the readership of your paper by allowing
unrestricted access. More broadly read papers have a high chance of being cited;
Therefore, making your papers more accessible by publishing in open access
journals can improve your research profile.
Collegiality is positive interactions among colleagues collaborating widely
and enhancing your collegiality will further expose your research. Highly
collaborative researchers are generally more trusted in the research community,
and thus, can be well-known among members of the editorial board for journals.
Journal editors that are familiar with well-cited researchers are more likely
to trust the soundness of their research and expect reliable results. Therefore,
improving your research network and publishing solid research can improve
your chances of journal acceptance in later stages of your career.
Within the life sciences, publishing in top-tier journals with high impact
factors contributes to improving your research profile and enhancing your
professional judgment. There are many journal options for
authors. Choosing a suitable journal for your research will depend on the
soundness of your research, its acceptance by the research community, and
the audience you aim to target. Advancing ecology research can be limited by the
time required to collect data in field or lab work. Publishing research papers
can depend on these time constraints together with the time constraints of
Journal turnaround times. Therefore, aligning the message of your paper with
the scope of the journal is important for publishing, and thus, advancing your
research career more efficiently. For the social sciences, the effect that your
selection of journal will have on your career depends on whether you're working
towards pursuing a clinical career (for example as a clinical neuropsychologist)
or a research career (for example as a cognitive neuroscience researcher). For
the clinically focused careers, the focus is often on publishing highly regarded
but smaller and with an associated smaller impact factor journals that are
aimed towards other clinicians. For the research focus career the greater
importance is placed on publishing in the highest impact journals possible.
This will often require making a judgment call on the quality and
particularly the novelty of the research and aiming to submit to the highest
journal that you believe you have a shot at being published in. For example, for
work that is both very novel and methodologically sound you may aim to
submit to Current Biology or Nature. Whereas for less novel, but still
methodological sound work, you might select a journal like Psychological
Science as the first attempt for publication. Often you must work your way
down a ranked list of ideal journals in the case of rejection. This can be a
time-consuming process as it may involve submitting to three or more journals and
reformatting the publication accordingly numerous times before the manuscript is
eventually accepted. We hope you enjoyed this tip. Once again, this is Emily from
uni-edit. Have a wonderful day!