Publishing

These resources provide varying details on journals in the MeJo field.

• Scimago Journal Rank (SJR)
  Lists journal and country scientific indicators developed Elsevier B.V., a competitor to ISI’s Journal Citation Report. Lists many (but not all) journals in Communication, but not many in journalism.

• Cabell’s Directories of Publishing Opportunities
  Acceptance/rejection rates for select journals, plus other information about the review process, the manuscript requirements, and contact information. Searching is tricky; ask library staff for help. Not all journals included.

• Ulrichsweb
  Provides detailed information on serials published throughout the world. Data often includes circulation, cost, brief history of publication. Sometimes includes reviews from library publications. Frequently indicates where journal is indexed.

Open Access

Open access (OA) “is the free, online availability of scholarly content that is free from most copyright and licensing restrictions” (per UNC’s guide to Open Access and Scholarly Communications).
Tips for determining if an open access journal is reputable:

• Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) list of members
  If a journal is a member of OASPA, it is very likely a reputable title which adheres to best practices for maintaining and disseminating OA scholarly communications.

• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) includes a list of over 100 journals in media and communication
  If a journal is listed in the library-maintained DOAJ, it is likely a reputable title.

See UNC Library’s guide Preparing to Publish for more tips on finding and evaluating open access journals.
See also Yale Library’s comprehensive guide Choosing a Journal for Publication of an Article for additional resources. Not all of these are available at UNC.

Check Citation Counts

Use Web of Science, Google Scholar and Scopus to check citation counts for authors or journals. Examples:

• Measure your research impact: check out this excellent guide created by UNC’s Health Sciences Library.
• Search Web of Science for the article titled “Coronavirus, Ageism, and Twitter: An Evaluation of Tweets about Older Adults and COVID-19“. You’ll see that it’s been cited over 125 times since its publication in 2020.
• Search Google Scholar for the article “Coronavirus, Ageism, and Twitter“. You’ll see that it’s been cited over over 275 times since its publication. Check out Scopus for the “Coronavirus” article as well.  As you can see, the databases return varying results.
• Search Google Scholar for the journal PLos One. You’ll see that multiple articles in this journal have been been cited hundreds of times, lending the open access title lots of credibility.  
• Search Scopus for Seth Noar’s article “Mind the gap: bringing our theories in line with the empirical data – a response to commentaries“. This will take you to the article and citations for its references. If you click on Noar’s name, you’ll see he has more than 240 documents that have been cited over 9,500 times.
• Search WorldCat for books by Chris Roush. You’ll see a listing of 55+ print books, 28+ e-books and 8 dissertations and theses, in 2 languages. Ask library staff to see how many times any (or all) of these items has been borrowed from the UNC-Chapel Hill libraries.
• Search the Open Syllabus Project for a specific work, or browse the readings assigned in the disciplines of Media, Journalism and Communication. The Project has collected over “1 million syllabi, has extracted citations and other metadata from them” and makes the metadata freely available online.

Finding Scholars

• Search Scopus for Affiliation to see the articles from a single university. Use the Advanced Search for more detailed searching, such as AFFIL((University of North Carolina) AND (Chapel Hill) AND (journalism OR comm*)). Or use the Document search to add more fields.

Doing Peer Review?

• Check out these Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers (pdf) from the Committee on Publication Ethics.