So you’ve begun writing a research paper and you are
starting to think about where to send it. Sometimes picking the journal is
easy: the subject matter is so specific that there are only a few places that
will take it. Other times picking the journal to send your article feels like
you are trying to find the right foster parents for your baby. (Okay, maybe not
that hard.) Do you go for open access? Highest impact factor? Speed? Prestige?
All these factors matter and yes your academic career can be defined by where, and
where you don’t, publish.
What’s that
you say, the journal doesn’t matter, only the content. Good luck with that.
When you apply for an academic job the first thing (perhaps the only thing)
that will be scrutinized is your list of pubs in your CV, not necessarily the
pubs themselves. The person looking over your CV will look at your list of pubs
and thinking thoughts like, “Hmmm…lots of first authored things, all of them
are in low tier journals though….the best papers [the ones in high impact
journals] were written by someone else.” Wouldn’t you think it was odd reading
someone’s CV and seeing they have 15 publications all published in one journal?
Unless that lone journal is Science,
diversity is a good thing to have among the journals you’ve published in. I try
not to submit different papers to the same journal even in the same year. Doing
so may give the appearance that you have a friend on the inside that can fast
track it or help out with negative reviews. Unlikely the case, but people think
strange things when trying to read between the lines of someone’s resume.
I love open
access (OA) journals like the PLoS group. Unfortunately even though this is one
of the best run outlets for science, some people, especially the old guard,
have stigmatized open access. Some think open access journals are “pay-to-play”
even though you can get part or all of the publishing fees waived at PLoS very
easily. (You should pay if you can to help out, remember PLoS isn’t your
traditional publishing powerhouse http://www.plos.org/publish/pricing-policy/publication-fees/.)
Other open access journals are far cheaper (e.g., PeerJ). Open access also
takes a big hit from a stereotype caused by predatory OA journals that don’t
actually put much effort into reviews but that do want your money (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full
but also see rebuttal here http://neurodojo.blogspot.com/2013/10/open-access-or-vanity-press-science.html).
No matter these concerns, open access is the future. Still most journals don’t
have this option and in order to diversify you might need to look elsewhere.
The
traditional line is to publish your paper in the best journal you can get it
into. If you really have something good and want to go high impact you still
have some decisions to make. You can go for the actual highest impact factor or
the most prestigious. This is kind of like picking a college. If you are a
zoology major you might pick a small public university because it actual has a
zoology program over going to Harvard (which doesn’t), even though Harvard
carries more prestige. Likewise, Molecular
Ecology is a great journal with an impact factor of 6.25 but it doesn’t
have nearly the prestige of Evolution (4.86)
or American Naturalist (4.55). I picked
Molecular Ecology for a paper that I
could have easily sent to those other two journals because I wanted the paper
to come out quickly and those other two journals are notoriously slow (would
likely take more than a year). I almost always have picked speed over prestige
in my career, mostly because I like to get things off my plate and I’m aiming
to average about five pubs a year. I don’t think I sacrificed quality for
quantity in doing so. Still, I do sometimes regret those decisions. Part of it
is pride, when I’m introduced for a seminar it would be nice to hear, “he has
published in Science, Nature, and Systematic Biology,” but I haven’t. My Molecular Ecology paper was published in
2011 and is one of my favorites. I was very happy with how it was handled at
that journal and how it looks. The topic is bioluminescence and sexual
selection and included phylogenetic analyses, and analyses of disparity and
diversification (http://www.prosanta.net/docs/MolEcol.pdf);
it was the culmination of my postdoctoral project and it has been cited exactly
zero times. I can’t help but wonder
if more people would have seen it if I sent it to one of the slower but more
well known journals. This is a little counter intuitive since Molecular Ecology’s higher impact factor is due to its papers getting cited
more on average than these other journals.
I recently
went up for tenure and had a positive vote, I was told that one place to
improve was having some papers in more prestigious journals. I agree,
especially as I transition into this more stable academic period. These
journals may be slow but they are traditionally the most selective with what
they publish and so there is some honor associated with publishing there. However,
I would recommend to students and pre-tenure folks that in general, it is definitely
okay to go for speed, especially if (1) you might get scooped; (2) you need to maintain
a relatively high and steady rate of publishing (> 3-5 pubs a yr). Keep in
mind that one first authored paper in a very prestigious journal might be worth
several in very low ranking journals. The sacrifice of prestige over speed
often isn’t always that much. If you can maintain a steady rate of publishing
and still have a few projects to send to big journals by all means go for
prestige even if that means a few more months of waiting and perhaps an extra
reviewer. I think in the near future the “best” journals will be fast, free,
open access, prestigious and highest impact. Unfortunately, today those
qualities are rarely found in one place so you have to pick what you want for
each paper and calculate what you are willing to sacrifice to get it.
