Diversifying Journals for Publication?

[coffeekid]

Hey friends,

Let's say you're a few years away from entering the job market, and you're setting some reasonably ambitious publishing goals for yourself. Maybe four peer-reviewed pubs over the course of a few years.

My question is: Is it better to repeat publish in the same journals multiple times in a span like this, or would it be better to diversify. Naturally you're going to be aiming with journals with a high reputation or impact factor, but if you're going to manage this either way, which would be better for entering the job market?

I understand that if you're in the hard sciences, if you could have all four articles in NATURE, then yeah, screw diversity. I'm thinking largely about the humanities and social science in which there are touchstone journals for certain subfields, but nothing that trumps them all.

[fuzzylogician]

I recently participated in a panel discussion with professors who discussed this very question. Their answer - publish in diverse journals. Make sure your work is perceived as relevant to a wide audience and also don't give the impression that you can only work with one editor or editorial process.

[Zencarrot]

I think that for most scholars, publishing in the same journal repeatedly isn't necessarily even a choice. Most researchers default to publishing in multiple journals simply because a particular high impact journal that they were aiming for does not always accept their work (or in fact, rarely does!). I recently read a very good article from a respected methodologist in my field. He said that oftentimes papers are rejected not because they are of low quality but because certain journals cannot find the appropriate reviewers or the article simply does not align with the mission of the journal as well as other submissions do. Thus, the most ideal strategy (at least in my field) is to publish in the highest impact journals that you can, but do not be preoccupied with publishing in the same journal. Find the most suitable outlet for your work, and keep trying other journals until you find a suitable match (the reviewer feedback should also strengthen your manuscript along the way).

[coffeekid]

Fuzzylogician and Zencarrot,

Thanks for your insight on this. It's always encouraging to find others thinking similarly about problems that you're just beginning to encounter for the first time.

The issue of relevancy in scholarship is pretty significant, perhaps for me in particular. Something I fear for myself is not committing sufficiently in the few disciplines from which I draw, alienating myself from them all. So this approach might give me a reasonable foot hold in enough circles to sell myself.

And yes, Zencarrot, I hope my post didn't come across as arrogant. I realize that these are ambitious publishing goals, and I'd be lucky to have the opportunity to have anything published twice by the same, reputable journal. Perhaps the strategy would be to space out submissions to the same journal, allowing time to elapse between making similar contributions, stemming from specific research interests?

[Zencarrot]

I think you're taking the right approach. In my opinion, keeping an open mind about research and not overcommitting to a particular discipline is the best way to conduct research that is relevant; at least in the social sciences. The social sciences are so heavily interrelated that researchers who take the most myopic view of research are the most likely to become overspecialized and consequently less relevant. Some of the best research I have seen in I/O psychology, for instance, has drawn heavily from theory in other related disciplines such as social psychology, economics, management science, and even clincial psychology (not all at once though ).

 

No worries - your post didn't come across as arrogant to me. If you are really set on a particular journal, I wouldn't worry about spacing out the time between submission as long as what you submit is of high quality. I do not think that submission freqeuncy has much bearing on acceptance. The only individual who knows the author(s) of the submitted paper is the editor. Provided you do not receive a desk rejection due to some fatal flaw in your paper, it makes no difference to the reviewers how frequently you submit because they won't know who wrote the papers

 

That being said, the creation of sound theory and rigorous research takes time, and so time will inevitably elapse regardless between submissions (perhaps more than you would sometimes want...!).

[TakeruK]

Hey friends,

I understand that if you're in the hard sciences, if you could have all four articles in NATURE, then yeah, screw diversity. I'm thinking largely about the humanities and social science in which there are touchstone journals for certain subfields, but nothing that trumps them all.

Even in the hard sciences, after you get past Nature and Science, there isn't really a journal that could trump them all. In astronomy/planetary sciences, there are something like 4-5 other journals that would be roughly similar. And considering that Nature and Science is very exclusive, most people in the hard sciences will be in a similar situation as you described for the humanities and social sciences above.

 

In my field, I don't think it matters too much whether you publish all 4 of your papers in the same journal or in different journals. The editors / editorial process may be different but chances are, you are not really going to get different peer reviewers because chances are, many authorities in the field have published in all the similar journals and so they would likely be peer reviewing submissions from many journals. 

 

Also, it's not like people read journal articles by reading a physical or electronic copy of a journal issue cover to cover. So, in my field anyways, you don't really have to worry about not reaching a specific audience by choosing the "wrong" journal. The people interested in your work will find your article through some centralized indexing/abstract service, such as arxiv, Web of Science, NASA ADS, etc. When we (fellow grad students, as well as post-docs and profs) discuss a journal article, we might not even remember what journal it was published in until we look up the actual bibliographical reference.

 

But there are still some good reasons to pick one journal over another. The first one is impact factor for the particular topic/subfield of your general field but as discussed above, sometimes the differences aren't really there. Another one could be if your paper is expanding on previous work, you would probably publish it in the same journal. Or, you might find out that another group is doing very similar work so you might coordinate with them to submit your independent work simultaneously to the same issue of the same journal.  Or maybe the same differences in editorial policies and timescales for review might be important. Finally, in the sciences, the PI is often a coauthor and a lot of times, as students, we end up submitting where our supervisors suggest. 

[Guest |||]

Unless you plan on publishing exclusively in science/nature, diversity won't just be a plus, it more or less will be a must