This month’s CIB Pulse Survey focused on seeking to understand what potential authors consider when they select a publication outlet for their research. We had 30 respondents (14 from Europe) with variety of experience as a first author.
We asked respondents to rank 6 possible criteria when considering a journal for research outputs. Average ranks are provided in the table below. A lower number indicates more importance of that criterion.
| Mean | N | Std. Dev. | |
| Scope of the journal in relation to my research | 2.30 | 30 | 1.841 |
| My perception of the journal’s reputation | 3.13 | 30 | 1.717 |
| Whether colleagues / supervisors respect the journal | 3.57 | 30 | 1.278 |
| Impact Factor | 3.90 | 30 | 1.729 |
| Quickness of the review process | 4.00 | 30 | 1.414 |
| Editor / Editorial team | 4.10 | 30 | 1.647 |
We asked what other criteria are important to authors and received some insightful responses. The quality of reviews and the review process were highlighted as important among respondents. One respondent focused on the quality of the process with this quote “Quality of peer review. Quality of editing. Speed is NOT important – an additional month or two is trivial if a paper has a long shelf life. Publisher is important. I do not like the rapacious commercial academic publishers – they are ripping us off with high fees and poor added value.” Another respondent wrote “Reputation of the journal is more important than the editorial team. Quality of previous reviews is also a determining factor.”
Another respondent cautioned against taking the ranking results too generally, with this reply of good advice, “Selection of journals is a little more complex than this and it varies depending on the output. Sometimes it is important to get a paper published quickly, sometimes the impact factor is important because of funding. It is not quite as black and white as this survey would suggest.”
One respondent explained the importance of conference publications and author placement. “In many IT fields conferences are as important as journals. Also, in my field the convention of last author being the senior author/supervisor is prevalent.”
We hope these results provide some interesting input to your consideration of publication outlets in the future. For feedback on this article, please email Michael Behm, [email protected].
