How to Identify a Scholarly Journal
Written by: Gabriel MacAdam
Thumbnail Photo by Siora Photography on Unsplash
As you progress through your undergraduate degree at Saint Mary’s University, the courses you take will become more difficult, and you will be required to produce a higher level of quality research, regardless of your specific field of study. For this reason, the associate university librarian and information technology services, Peter Webster, stresses that undergraduate students need to learn to identify scholarly journals to help with future studies. In an online webinar hosted by Webster, he addresses how to identify scholarly and predatory journals when doing research.
What makes a scholarly journal?
The two main ingredients to identifying a scholarly journal are reputation and recommendation. Having an understanding of reputable publishers and organizations can make a huge difference when choosing where to gather information for research. This is because well-known publishers like Nature/Science, Elsevier or Jstor or scholarly organizations such as American Chemical Society and The Academy of Management are peer-reviewed. Peer-reviewed articles are articles that have been critically reviewed by academics or professionals in the same field of study prior to being published. Typically, journal editors will send submitted articles to several experts to examine the research, data, and conclusions to determine its validity. In other words, the validity of an article is the factual soundness of the arguments being made. These articles are more credible because they have been thoroughly assessed by experts and offer a higher level of academic standard. Another way to identify a scholarly journal is whether or not it is recommended either through colleges and universities or on a recommenders list. Recommender lists are systems that produce a ranked list of the most scholarly journals to the least scholarly journal based on a series of factors such as article acceptance rates, article citations, author citations, and article visibility (which refers to the number of times an article has been seen or read).
What is an “open access” journal/article?
Most journals are behind a paywall, however, universities pay subscription fees in order to access these journals via their university library. However, if you don’t have an institutional affiliation, that means you typically won’t have access to those closed access journals unless you paid for it yourself. When an article or journal is open access this means that you don’t need to pay to access the article or journal. In other words, it is free and open to the public. Authors will often payout of grants for their research to be open access rather than have universities pay a monthly subscription. This is because open access provides more visibility for authors given that it is free for everyone. Open access articles are a win-win situation because it benefits everyone involved. For instance, researchers are able to read and build on the findings of other experts in their field without monetary restriction (known as paywalls). Further, scholars and students worldwide have access to the latest research findings and authors develop notoriety alongside the increased visibility. The argument against open-access journals is that some academics see open-access as less prestigious, lower quality, and push publishing cost on the author/academic.
How to measure scholarly impact?
According to Webster, the quality of a scholarly journal can be measured in four key different ways.
The first is based on overall citation counts. If you can find an article that is widely cited, that is evidence that the article is of higher quality, and that the research findings are important to the field.
The second key factor in measuring a scholarly journal is the author’s citation counts over time. When an author has a lot of citations, they are likely well-known in their field and have contributed many important findings through their career. You can find author citations through different databases that offer journal, article and author citation information such as Web of Science (available for SMUdents in the Saint Mary’s University Library under the database tab), SCOPUS, PubMed. Other alternative methods for citation counts are Google Scholar, however, Google Scholar counts differently than other citation tracking databases because it is more lenient in determining citations.
The third method for checking journal quality is overall visibility and popularity. An article with a high number of views is indicative that the article is actively being used by others in research. However, this does not necessarily mean that the article is scholarly but more so speaks toward its popularity. There is plenty of research that is controversial or provocative, and so it’s still important to be an informed reader of academic content.
The fourth and final way to measure an article's scholarly impact is through altmetrics, which is a summary of all the mentions an article receives. In other words, altmetrics measures how the amount of ‘talk’ or ‘chatter’ an article is producing. Although, determining the scholarly impact of a ‘mention’ depends on the type of mention. For instance, an article that receives a mention from an established organization like CBC news has a greater chance of meeting an academic standard than a random user mention on Twitter.
What are predatory journals?
Predatory journals are journals that take an author's money and publish articles that often have not been peer-reviewed. This is a problem that leads to misleading research and information. Typically, predatory journals will publish anything they can as long as they’ve been paid by the author. Oftentimes predatory journals will format their platform or website to appear as an academic journal or will have a title that resembles an accredited academic journal. Predatory journals can be found on Cabells Predatory Reports (formally known as Cabell’s Blacklist), which is a subscription service that offers a database of predatory journals and verified journals along with details about each of the journals.
Understanding what makes a journal scholarly will help you a lot throughout your undergraduate studies. Using scholarly, peer-reviewed journals and materials for research can make the difference between a good paper and a great one. This means knowing what makes a journal scholarly such as verifying publishing organizations, journal notoriety, and checking recommendations from universities. Furthermore, an article’s scholarly impact and quality depend on the article’s citation counts, author citation count, visibility and altmetrics. Be sure to verify whether or not the research you’re using is peer-reviewed and is verified by experts within the field of study to avoid using misinformation.