Evaluating Journals for Quality and Legitimacy

As a researcher, you need to know where you can access quality scholarly articles and where to publish your own work.  Evolving publishing practices, including the increase of open access journals, have altered the ways scholars share and use journal articles.  With more publishing methods and journal options to choose from, it is essential to evaluate the quality and legitimacy of a publication.

This guide provides information on traditional measures of journal quality - including impact factors and journal ranking services.  It also furnishes information regarding alternative metrics or “altmetrics”, which include newer evaluative techniques tracking the circulation of scholarship on an article level via non-traditional sources such as blogs, social media, and other online methods.

Predatory publishers and journals are a major concern in the scholarly community.  These publications are not considered legitimate academic or scholarly publications as they fail to follow accepted standards of publishing peer-reviewed research.  Predatory publications often masquerade as legitimate scholarly journals and can be difficult to detect.  This guide contains helpful information on how to discern between predatory and legitimate publications.