Getting Published – advice from Emerald

Simon Linacre and Ruth Bailey from Emerald recently visited MBS for a presentation/workshop on getting published (and understanding journal rankings).

The first part described how articles are handled from a publisher’s perspective and offered several important tips for getting published.

• Consider your reader – what will make your paper interesting, clear, relevant and memorable for them
• Consider your potential reader – most people only see the title (and abstract) of your paper through a search engine - Will your target readers want to find out more?
• Consider your editor and publisher – follow the author guidelines!

The second part discussed where to publish and specifically the influence of journal rankings.

• In the UK the forthcoming REF research assessment will use either ISI (Thomson Journal Citation Reports) or Scopus (Elsevier).
• ISI (available through Web of Knowledge) covers 12,000 journals (67% science, 21% social science, 12% humanities)
  Scopus covers 18,000 (40% science, 30% social science, 30% humanities)
• Some countries only consider ISI journals, Australia is compiling its own index, UK has the ABS (Association of Business Schools) ranking list, while in the US Scopus and ISI have limited impact.
• There is growing use of Google scholar as a source of publication impact data but it will be some time before this is an influence at the national level.

Simon’s advice was to be aware that universities are very interested where their staff and students publish as it influences their ranking, but remember that it is your career (you may move somewhere with a different ranking).

Among the discussions, the most discussed topic was the influence of open access publishing and institutional repositories. This is going to have an influence over the next few years. Emerald like most publishers is watching how things develop.

Related FAQ questions:

• Where can I find a ranking and rating of business and management journals? (updated 27/03/11)
• Search results for Emerald