Access the metrics toolkit below, it offers a comprehensive overview of bibliometric and altmetric indicators, listing their benefits and limitations.
Several factors can contribute to your decision about which journal in which to publish your work, including publisher integrity, cost, embargo periods, and external policy requirements (such as the REF or UKRI policy). The video below is part of a campaign called Think, Check, Submit designed to help researchers ask the right questions at the right time.
The campaign is also designed to combat the threat of predatory publishers. Such publishers are known to pursue inexperienced researchers keen for their work to be visible, and encourage them to publish in little-known journals.
Tips to avoid predatory publishers:
Video by Think. Check. Submit. Released under a CC-BY license.
The university’s preferred method of open access publishing is green (often with an embargo but at no cost to the university). However, the University also offers a gold (instant open access) route for Wiley, Cambridge University Press, and SAGE journals (see our page on transformative agreements).
For more about the 'colours' of open access, see this useful summary by IGI Global.
An embargo is a period of time after publication that a journal article is not permitted to be made freely available to the public via an repository or website (but can be accessed via subscription). For example, if a journal has a 12 month embargo period it means articles in that journal cannot be made open access, in a repository like BGRO, until 12 months after their publication date.
In order to be eligible for the REF an article must appear in a journal with an embargo period:
REF panels map to different subject areas.
Embargo periods do not apply to all journals. To check if a journal is subject to an embargo enter the journal title or ISSN into Sherpa, a free database that lists the embargo and copyright restrictions for a wide range of UK journal titles.
The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) recognizes the need to improve the ways in which the outputs of scholarly research are evaluated. The declaration was developed in 2012 during the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology in San Francisco. It is a worldwide initiative covering all scholarly disciplines and all key stakeholders including funders, publishers, professional societies, institutions, and researchers.
It is designed to take emphasis away from journal-based metrics and, instead, focus on the quality of individual research outputs. It is based around three guiding principals:
More information about DORA can be found here.
Content in this box is licensed by DORA under CC-BY.
For inspiration, why not browse BGU's journal collection using BrowZine. Search for a specific journal, or browse by subject, and discover the contents of each issue. NB. You cannot use BrowZine to search for a specific article - use WorldCat for that.
To find a journal article by its DOI (Digital Object Identifier) use LibKey.io
If you use Google Chrome we recommend you install the LibKey Nomad browser extension. Once installed, this will flag if BGU library provides access to an article you come across online. Instructions for adding the extension are below.