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Vision Science: Publishing

UC Open Access Policy

The University if California has open access policies that apply to all UC employees including faculty, lecturers, researchers, post-docs, staff, and graduate students. Authors are asked to make available an open access copy of their work. Providing an author manuscript to eScholarship, UC's open access repository, fulfills this obligation.

Submitting to a Journal? First Identify Journals That Publish on Your Topic

Through Scopus

  1. Visit the Scopus database.
  2. Search for recent articles on your research topic.
  3. Above the results, click “Analyze search results."
  4. Click in the "Documents per year by source" box.
  5. On the left you will see the results listed by the number of articles published on your research topic per journal.

Through Web of Science

  1. Visit the Web of Science database.
  2. Search for recent articles on your research topic.
  3. In the results, click "Analyze Results" on the right hand side.
  4. From the drop-down menu near the top left, choose "Publication Titles."
  5. Change the "Minimum record count (threshold)," if desired.
  6. Scroll down for a table of results by journal title.

Journal Impact Measures

The journal impact factor is a calculation of how many citations the articles in a journal receive (over a 2-year average). It is used as a proxy measure of the quality of a journal. If the impact factor of a journal is 5, then on average, articles in this journal receive about five citations within the first two years after publication.

In any discussion of journal, article, or author metrics, it is imperative to remember Goodhart's law:
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

Journal Citation Reports: Find impact factors (Note: Journal websites generally will include the impact factor).

Scopus CiteScore metrics: Click “Sources" - An alternative to the JIF.

You may wish to read this brief article on the Journal Impact Factor:
Is the impact factor the only game in town?. P. Smart. Ann R Coll Surg Engl. 2015;97(6):405-8.

PLoS, a top-tier open access suite of journals, says this: "PLOS does not consider Impact Factor to be a reliable or useful metric to assess the performance of individual articles. PLOS supports DORA – the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment – and does not promote our journal Impact Factors."

In addition, citation counts themselves are not necessarily a good metric of importance; see How citation distortions create unfounded authority: analysis of a citation network. Greenberg SA. BMJ. 2009 Jul 20;339:b2680. doi: 10.1136/bmj.b2680.

Finally, one could argue that journal impact factor manipulation is itself a predatory journal trait.