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Education Resources

Resources for University of Houston students, faculty and researchers in Education

Publishing in Education

This page provides information about journal rankings, impact factors, using Cabell's Directories of Publishing Opportunities to find journals for your work, and how to look up your citation record online.

Journal Rankings

Journal rankings try to paint a picture of the quality of a journal. Rankings give journals a level of prestige that can make the journals highly competitive, which leads to a lot of people watching these journals. With more eyes on a journal, people are more likely to see articles in these titles and, most significantly, tend to use these materials more often in their own research.

How Are Journal Rankings Calculated?
Each system has its own method of calculating its scores. However, journal rankings are based on how often articles in these journals get cited and are typically averaged based on the number of articles published in the journal. Sometimes there can be weighting based on source of the citation (sort of what Google does with links).

How Are Journal Rankings Useful?

  1. Articles published within highly ranked journals are more likely to be seen because the journals are considered important. Closer attention means other researchers are more likely to consider your research in light of their own. Higher ranked journals are more likely to be indexed in multiple databases, which means that people will come across your work in highly ranked journals in additional ways.
     
  2. Publishing in higher ranked journals comes with a certain level of prestige. It can be competitive to have articles accepted into a highly ranked journal. Many researchers set getting published in a top ranked journal as a goal for 'one day.'
     
  3. Highly ranked journals are great sources as well. Academic discourse is a two way street, and we're all pressed for time.

What are the Different Ranking Systems?

  • Impact Factor is probably the most firmly entrenched system. Impact factor doesn't have any weighting for citations, and basically stands as the average of citations an article gets in the journal. Impact factor has been in use for along time, but it has limitations that measures try to address. You can access Impact Factors through Journal Citation Reports.
  • Eigenfactor is a newer score and considers the source of a citation in its analysis. Citations from higher ranked journals are weighted more heavily. It also uses a broader span of time and considers disciplinary differences in citation behavior. You can access Eigenfactor through Journal Citation Reports. However, a significant amount of information is also freely available from Eigenfactor.org.
  • Article Influence is a score that uses Eigenfactor to give an idea of the average influence an article may have in the next 5 years when published in a given journal. Higher ranked Article Influence scores for a journal communicate that articles are expected to have a higher influence in that journal. You can access Article Influence Scores through Journal Citation Reports. However, a significant amount of information is also freely available from Eigenfactor.org.
  • SNIP stands for Source Normalized Impact per Paper, and is weighted to account for how important getting a citation is in a given field of research (i.e. Physics vs Literary Criticism). It uses 4 years of data to calculate a score. You can access SNIP Scores through Scopus.
  • SJR is an abbreviation for the SCImago Journal & Country Rank. SJR is a "prestige factor" so to speak in that it weighs the citations from higher ranked journals more heavily. SJR functions much like Google's algorithm wherein certain linkings to your citations are more important than others. You can access SJR through Scopus. 

What are the Limitations of Journal Ranking Systems?

  1. Journal rankings are often dependent on the provider. If a journal isn't covered in the database providing the ranking information, then it is not going to be ranked.

  2. Journal rankings provide an idea of how often articles, on average, are cited in a journal (and therefore their impact on academia). Journal rankings do not speak to the success of individual authors or articles.

  3. Education is tricky for journal rankings. There are a lot of publications that are considered to be more professional which are not emphasized by these databases so they get left out of the rankings.

  4. Just because a journal is ranked higher than one that deals with your research does not necessarily mean you should switch. If you're researching in Physical Education, it's not going to matter that a science education journal is ranked higher (unless perhaps you're working on something that crosses both areas).

Looking Up Journal Rankings

InCites Journal Citation Reports allows you to browse journals by categories. The Social Sciences category lists a few subtopics for Education. Journals can be sorted by total citations, title, Open Access availability, journal impact factor, and more!

Scopus allows you to search for journals ("Sources") by Title. You can compare metrics such as annual citations, SJR, SNIP, and more for up to ten sources at a time.

Finding Journals for your Work

Cabell's Directories of Publishing Opportunities allow you to select topics within two broad areas of Education:

  • Educational Curriculum & Methods
  • Educational Psychology & Administration

While browsing journals, you might consider the following:

  • CCI (Cabell's Classification Index) is a metric used by Cabell's to look at citation frequencies within and between disciplines. Checking one or more of these boxes will give you all the title ranked in the range indicated. 
  • Acceptance Rate: The directory includes information on the rates at which journals accept submitted articles for publication. These rates can be influenced by how many articles are invited, the number of submissions, prestige, difficulty of the review, etc.

You can sort your result list in Cabell's by CCI, Acceptance Rate, Title of Journal, Length of Review Period, and more!

There are also resources available that can help you select an appropriate journal through a text analysis of your abstract. Check out the UH Libraries Scholarly Publishing guide for more information.

Your Citation Record

Web of Science allows you to do a simple search by author. You can claim your Author Profile in order to ensure that all of the records listed with your name are indeed for your articles. Web of Science will provide citation reports for an author that include publication and citation rates, data about those citations, your h-index, and a breakdown of how many citations an article received in a given year.

Scopus has a decent amount of education coverage that may not overlap with Web of Science. It's a good idea to check Scopus to see if any of your work has picked up citations that Web of Science did not. However, if you've been publishing for a long time, your older articles won't be well covered here.

Conduct an author search using your surname, first name or initials, and affiliation. You can click on the author name from the results to analyze the citation record in Scopus. If you are listed under different records because of variations of your name, you can request to merge your records in Scopus.