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 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?
What are the Different Ranking Systems?
What are the Limitations of Journal Ranking Systems?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Cabell's Directories of Publishing Opportunities allow you to select topics within two broad areas of Education:
While browsing journals, you might consider the following:
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.
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.