Graduate Student Information & Resources: Getting Published

There are many factors to consider when determining the most appropriate journals in which to publish your research. Below are some tips to get you started.

• Discipline relevance and reaching the desired target audience.
• Journal quality or impact.
• Prestige of the editorial team, contributors, or journal circulation.
• Open access policy.

There are various ways of measuring research impact, particularly through traditional means of publishing and citation. Before you begin to delve into the various citation metrics, we recommend you do the following:

Create a Google Scholar Citations Profile: Google scholar citations allows authors to track citations to their scholarly works and to calculate numerous citation metrics based on Google Scholar citation data. By setting up a profile, you will be able to disambiguate yourself from authors with the same or similar names. 

An author's impact on their field or discipline has traditionally been measured using the number of times their academic publications are cited by other researchers. There are numerous algorithms, e.g. H-Index, G-Index, i10-Index, that account for such things as the currency of the publication, and poorly or highly cited papers. While citation metrics may reflect the impact of research in a field, there many more potential biases with these measurements and should be used with care. For a critique of author impact factors, read this article in Chronicle of Higher Education.

1. H-Index in Web of Science - used to quantify research output by measuring author productivity and impact.

H-Index = number of papers (h) with a citation number ≥ h. Example: A scientist with an H-Index of 37 has 37 papers cited at least 37 times.

Advantages of the H-Index

• Allows for direct comparisons within disciplines.
• Measures quantity and impact by a single value.

Disadvantages of the H-Index

• Does not give an accurate measure for early-career researchers.
• Calculated by using only articles that are indexed in Web of Science.

For additional information on H-Index, read - An index to quantity and individual's scientific research output an original paper by J.E. Hirsch proposing and describing the H-Index.

2. i10-Index - created by Google Scholar and used in Google's My Citations feature. It is a very simple measure that helps gauge the productivity of a scholar and is only used by Google Scholar.

i10Index = the number of publications with at least 10 citations.

Advantages of i10-Index

• Very simple and straightforward to calculate.
• My Citations in Google Scholar is free and easy to use.

Disadvantages of i10-Index

• Used only in Google Scholar.

3. G-Index

The G-Index was proposed by Leo Egghe in his paper Theory and Practice of the G-Index in 2006 as an improvement on the H-Index.

Advantages of the G-Index

• Accounts for the performance of author's top articles.

Disadvantages of the G-Index

• Introduced in 2006, and debate continues whether G-Index is superior to H-Index.
• May no be as widely accepted as H-Index.

Journal impact measurements reflect the importance of a particular journal in a field and take into account the number of articles published per year, as well as, the number of citation to articles published in that journal.

The advent of social media and web analytics has opened the door to new possibilities in exploring and quantifying the impact a journal makes.  Here are a few research resources for evaluation of scholarly publications.