A researcher’s goal is to publish research to disseminate information relevant to improving society and, in the process, one’s career and credibility. In fact, Rørstad and Aksnes (2015) noted that factors such as age, gender, and academic position affect the publication rate at the individual level. Their study, which used regression analyses and involved 12,400 Norwegian university researchers, found that academic position is more important than age and gender. Their regression model can explain a 13.5%–19% variance in publication rate.
Getting back to the topic, if you just graduated, whether it’s Bachelor’s or a Doctorate, and have already transformed your thesis or dissertation into a potential journal article, you might be thinking of where you should publish it. Whether you’re a beginner or a researcher who’s been in the industry for some time, when it comes to finding the right journal for your manuscript, all authors should consider specific factors; among these are journal metrics such as acceptance rates, impact factors, and turnaround times.
Acceptance Rates
A journal’s acceptance rate is the percentage of submitted papers that are ultimately chosen for publication. It’s not as simple as it seems; like most things in the research journal world, there’s more to it than meets the eye.
To calculate a journal’s acceptance rate, divide the number of accepted manuscripts by the number of submitted manuscripts. For example, if a journal accepts 55 manuscripts in 1 year but receives 600 in the same year, the journal’s acceptance rate is:
Although this seems straightforward, what does this acceptance rate truly mean? If a journal rejected a manuscript with an acceptance rate of about 12%, it suggests that the manuscript was poorly written; excellent but out of the journal’s aims, scope, and readership; or a specific topic was prioritized, and your manuscript’s topic is not within that scope. Moreover, other journals calculate their acceptance rates in a different way. For instance, they could calculate the proportion of accepted submissions by dividing the total number of submissions by the number of submissions that were either accepted or rejected. This alternative method results in a lower reported acceptance rate for the publisher than a publisher with an equal number of accepted and rejected articles.
Thus, aside from knowing the journal’s acceptance rate, it also helps that you know how rates are calculated in the first place. To begin this journey, we need to know the average acceptance rate for all journals. In a study conducted by Elsevier, which evaluated around 2,300 journals (> 80% were published by Elsevier) in 2020, the calculated average acceptance rate was 32%, with acceptance rates ranging from just a little above 1% to as high as 93.2%. They found that acceptance rates for larger journals with wider readership and a higher number of submissions and citations per year are lower than those for smaller journals, ranging from 10% to 60%. Also, older journals have lower acceptance rates than younger journals, but only by a small margin, and high-impact journals have relatively low acceptance rates, although there is still considerable fluctuation (5%–50% acceptance).
Even though there isn’t a central repository for journal acceptance rates, you can see this data in editor reports, journal search engines, and journal metrics pages. However, not all journals have this information readily available.
Impact Factors
The impact factor (IF) measures how many times an average publication in a journal gets referenced in a given year. Clarivate Analytics publishes the Journal Impact Factors™ (JIFs) as part of the Web of Science Journal Citation Reports (JCR)™ each year. JCR is a report on the citation effect of a specific collection of journals at one particular time, and, nowadays, it is used as a tool used by the academe, journals, and researchers in building and managing journal collections, gauging journal performance, assessing competitors, and identifying suitable journals. Meanwhile, a JIF is assigned to journals listed in the Science Citation Index Expanded® (SCIE) and Social Sciences Citation Index® (SSCI) and is defined as the total number of scholarly articles, also known as citable items, published in the journal in the preceding two years divided by the total number of citations to the journal in the JCR year. To calculate a JIF, we must divide a journal’s received citations by a count of published articles.
The numerator of a JIF is any citation from material published in the JCR year to material published in the journal in the past two years, regardless of the kind of item mentioned. Each reference listed in a scientific article represents a recognition of impact. As a result, regardless of the kind of cited article, JCR combines all citations to a specific journal in the numerator. Meanwhile, the denominator includes citable items, all materials indexed as articles or reviews in the Web of Science™, and does not contain items of any other document type, such as editorial content, letters, and conference abstracts.
Impact Factors (IFs) help assess a journal’s value by measuring the number of times chosen articles are mentioned in a given year. As a result, the bigger the number of citations or articles from a specific publication, or the impact factor, the higher it is rated. If you wish to compare journals in the same subject group, checking the journal’s IF is an excellent way to do so.
Turnaround Times
The turnaround time is the period it takes for a journal to review and publish a paper. This metric is valuable to look at if you’re interested in how quickly your paper could be published. It is the period between submitting a manuscript or revising it electronically and receiving the editorial decision, which is currently almost exclusively done through a submission portal.
Before delving into turnaround times, we must know the steps involved in the review process. Each journal can have different steps, but the brief and most common process entails that a manuscript is sent to the editorial staff (usually one of the coeditors-in-chief, but sometimes one of the senior associate editors), who decides whether or not the manuscript will be sent out for external peer review. If it does, the editorial staff will review the comments, reviews, and manuscript again after receiving the reviewers’ comments. The manuscript’s coeditor-in-chief then makes the final choice and tells the author. At the same time, the reviewers are notified about the decision and reviews while remaining anonymous.
In a research performed by Runde (2021) regarding turnaround time in which they investigated various turnaround time–related data from 82 journals that publish articles in fisheries science, the median time to acceptance, median time to publishing, median time between acceptance and publication, percentage of papers published in less than six months, and percentage of articles published in more than a year were reviewed. Here, the periods of six months and one year were chosen as the lengths for the latter two measures because, while arbitrary, they may be typical of many authors’ perceptions of short and long turnaround times. Because the distributions of time-to-acceptance and time-to-publication were frequently biased to the right, medians were chosen. The findings revealed significant disparities in turnaround times among journals, with median times-to-publication ranging from 79 to 323 days. Thus, a paper can take about three months or almost a year, depending on the various factors.
Just this year, Taşkın et al. (2022) published a study determining the factors affecting time to publication (from submission to decision) in the field of information science by analyzing six information science journals. The results revealed that when an editorial board member or a prolific author of a particular journal was one of the authors, the publishing time was much shorter when compared to manuscripts submitted by other writers. Also, the number of authors had a time-prolonging influence on publication time. On the other hand, publications with more citations were accepted in less time, and papers with authors from central and high-income countries benefited from quicker publishing.
Now, how are these three related, and where can you see each journal’s metrics?
Following Runde’s (2021) study, it was found that there was no apparent relationship between turnaround time and acceptance rate or turnaround time and impact factor; however, acceptance rate and impact factor were inversely correlated. Thus, depending on your priority as an author, may it be publishing within a short time, having a wider readership, or ease in publication, consider the metric that best relates to your needs.
To have these data, some publishers make them readily accessible to help authors. For those published by Elsevier, you may visit their Journal Insights platform and choose your target journal. They calculate acceptance rates by dividing the total number of accepted papers by the total number of submitted articles. You can also view the Speed of Review to learn more about the journal’s turnaround time. Of course, JIFs are also included in the platform. If you already know which journal you’re going for and it’s under Elsevier, you can go to the journal’s web page and see all these journal metrics.
For Taylor & Francis, a journal metrics subpage is available for each journal published. You can also view brief discussions regarding the metrics shown on this subpage. To access these, visit tandfonline.com and look for your preferred journal.
Journals published by Springer also have specific web pages wherein their JIFs, turnaround time (submission to first decision), and usage or downloads are indicated. However, the acceptance rate isn’t included, which is also true for the journals published under Wiley, wherein each journal’s web page has the JIF but not the acceptance rate, even the turnaround time.
Still, suppose you cannot access these details. In that case, you may contact the journal, check library databases within your field, or do a web search of the specific society or organization handling your target journal. Yes, doing proper research for your study’s publication is tedious but rewarding, especially if you received that “Accepted” notification.
But if you really do not have the time to do another round of research after working on your manuscript, we can always help you through our Journal Selection service. With Journal Selection, we can help you navigate the publishing process and find the right journal for your paper. We can provide you with data on acceptance rates, impact factors, and turnaround times so that you can make the best decision for your manuscript. Visit us at https://journallab.io/ to learn more!
