Top 3 tips to ensure a world-class journal

  • Where do you find a reviewer with the relevant expertise and credentials to review your journal?
  • How can you manage a high volume of article submissions in an efficient and productive manner?
  • What is the best way to oversee multiple journals to ensure timely submission, quality peer review and timely publication?

Do you find these common journal-management challenges familiar? Journal editors and publishers have long encountered these pain points.

Estimates for the total number of academic journals in existence range from 70,000+ to 162,900+, according to data from Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory and a 2016 study in Scientometrics (Mongeon & Paul-Hus, 2016). The Web of Science platform indexes 34,000+ journals, which is about half of the lower estimate.

On the Web of Science platform, the Web of Science Core Collection contains more than 20,000 of the world’s most significant scholarly journals. It is the world’s oldest and most trusted citation index for scholarly materials. Acceptance rates for journals to be covered in the Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Science Citation Index and Arts & Humanities Citation Index are in the range of 10-12%. This low acceptance rate is an indication of the highly stringent criteria required, which many journals do not meet.

Building a quality journal is no easy task. Publishers, according to an enumerated list published by The Scholarly Kitchen,  have more than 100 related tasks to fulfill  (Anderson, 2018). Hence, a tool such as ScholarOne Manuscripts helps journal editors to reduce much of their administrative burden. ScholarOne Manuscripts is one solution that integrates the manuscript submission and review workflow seamlessly encompassing manuscript invitation, submission, real-time fee collection, file conversion, correspondence, tracking, reviewer management, decision making, reporting, and user-data management. These tasks can also be integrated with the journal publisher’s print and online production functions.

The three most common pain points that keep journal editors awake can be eased by implementing ScholarOne Manuscripts. Find out how ScholarOne Manuscripts is being used in Southeast Asia to manage journals. By maintaining a well-run journal using the system, one journal has even received its first Journal Impact Factor! The International Food Research Journal (IFRJ), from Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM), earned that distinction this year. The journal team manages its submission workflow using ScholarOne Manuscripts under UPM’s umbrella of journals.

Read a case study of how one journal received its first Journal Impact Factor by using ScholarOne Manuscripts.

References:

Anderson, K. (2018, 2018-02-06). Focusing on Value – 102 Things Journal Publishers Do (2018 Update) – The Scholarly Kitchen.  Retrieved from https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/02/06/focusing-value-102-things-journal-publishers-2018-update/

Mongeon, P., & Paul-Hus, A. (2016). The journal coverage of Web of Science and Scopus: a comparative analysis. Scientometrics, 106(1), 213-228. doi:10.1007/s11192-015-1765-5