A question frequently asked is "How can I tell if this journal is of good scholarly worth". Evaluative criteria often used include those discussed in the other boxes on this page.
A journal’s Impact Factor (IF) is often used to judge the quality of a journal. One may use the database Journal Citation Reports (JCR) to assess the IF of roughly 11,000 Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) journals. The IF is the frequency with which articles from a journal published in the past two years have been cited in a particular year. ISI’s IF is calculated by dividing the number of current year citations by the total number of articles published in the two previous years. An IF of 2.0 signifies that, on average, the articles published one or two years ago have been cited twice.
Caution: one of the major question marks associated with IFs is that only a small number of journals have them, i.e. only those journals indexed by JCR (over 8,000 journals in Science and 2,700 in the Social Sciences).
Google Scholar Metrics (GSM) allows one to gauge the visibility and influence of recent articles in scholarly journals. Particularly interesting is GSM’s listing of the top 100 publications in several languages, ordered by their five-year h-index and h-median metrics. More details.
Like the Impact Factor, the Eigenfactor® Score and Article Influence® Score use citation data to assess and track the influence of a journal in relation to other journals. The Eigenfactor Score calculation is based on the number of times articles from the journal published in the past five years have been cited in the JCR year, but it also considers which journals have contributed these citations so that highly cited journals will influence the network more than lesser cited journals.
The Article Influence determines the average influence of a journal's articles over the first five years after publication. It is calculated by dividing a journal’s Eigenfactor Score by the number of articles in the journal, normalized as a fraction of all articles in all publications. The mean Article Influence Score is 1.00. A score greater than 1.00 indicates that each article in the journal has above-average influence. A score less than 1.00 indicates that each article in the journal has below-average influence.
A hint about journal quality may be provided by the society, association, organization publishing it.
The scholarly reputation of editorial board members may provide tips about the quality of the journal. However, this strategy is clearly open to strong elements of subjectivity.
Methods for determining acceptance/rejection rates may differ from journal to journal. Journal X may calculate the acceptance rate based on the number of articles accepted out of all articles submitted. Journal Y may calculate the rate from the number of articles accepted out of the articles sent out for peer review. Another factor is the disciplinary area. A subject area for which few scholars write articles may have a higher acceptance rate than other more popular subject areas. A strategy useful for determining acceptance/rejection rates in some subject areas, e.g business and education, is to consult Cabell’s Directories of Publishing Opportunities.
A traditional criterion for evaluating the quality of a journal is to ascertain whether it is peer reviewed (refereed) or not. However, the challenge here is that often there is a very wide range of quality in peer reviewed journals. One may consult the database UlrichsWeb Global Serials Directory to determine if a journal is peer-reviewed.
Where a journal is indexed may give a clue as to its quality. The database UlrichsWeb Global Serials Directory provides detailed indexing information on over 300,000 journals, both academic and popular.
Many open access journals require authors to pay publication fees. This is not necessarily a red flag. Numerous quality OA journals, some very prestigious, have a system of “author pays". A particular problem, however, is the growth of "fake" journals whose sole goal is to obtain money from authors. A useful resource for determining some of these spurious journals is Jeffrey Beall's List of Predatory, Open-Access Publishers.
