1. Introduction
Indexing plays a key role in enabling scientific journals and articles to be easily discovered through search engines and library catalogs. The online visibility that indexing offers has motivated many journals to apply for inclusion in reputable indexing services. In turn, librarians and scientists have found indexed journals to be an efficient means of discovering that are relevant to their work. High-quality, peer-reviewed, scholarly research journals allow far-flung researchers to share their discoveries with each other; their visibility and ready availability allow researchers to act on each other's discoveries, thus speeding up advances in science and technology, and ultimately, our standard of living and quality of life. The ramifications on the dissemination and reach of published findings from using indexed journals instead of non-indexed journals as a publication avenue is a topic that has been discussed over the years, and often provides starting points for tangential discussions. Institutions considering allocating funds for research or placing emphasis for outputs along the lines of research would do well to emphasize and provide budgetary support for these types of submissions. This would lead to a more efficient allocation of funds dedicated towards research, ultimately leading to a more tangible societal impact for these outputs. While some endeavored at enlightening faculty about the importance of journals being included in an online indexing resource, there appears to be little in the way of studies on the overall role that participation in an indexed journal might confer researchers for their potential to be discovered. Journals that appeared on the Journal Citation Reports Science and Social Science editions were deemed to have high impact/activity research ligature for publication and were handed a higher quality designation.
2. Understanding Indexed Journals
A journal is a publication with a regular frequency of appearance which contains a number of articles relating to a specific area of research, philosophy or any other aspect of human activity. A journal may have general or restricted readers and authors. Indexed journals are those journals which were chosen by an indexing body to be indexed by them. The purpose of indexes is to organize all the literature in such a way as to make its retrieval by readers, especially researchers, as quick and as precise as possible. The purpose of the indexing body’s selection of journals is to catalogue those which are likely to be most used. The choice of journals to be indexed is, therefore, an important one and these choices may be different for different indices, depending upon how those journals vary from each other. Primary journals contain the highest significance and scholarly research but only a few articles, secondary journals present only a combination of material that appears first in primary journals with applications.
Citation databases select for inclusion the most important journals in a given field. Publishers of all disciplines are competing to have their respective journals and titles included in those databases and contribute to indexing, because this is where the peer-reviewed research is; that’s why those journals are called “indexed journals.” The main purpose of an index is to locate information, usually contained in a print-based system. The significance of indexing is crucial for productive access to that vast body of information that resides in periodicals. Authors and readers alike benefit from indexes, which show authors what topics have been published in which periodicals and enable readers to find articles on given topics. Journal indexing has become so comprehensive that journals are by far the most extensively indexed materials in the field. Subject, citation and other databases include more than fifty million indexed journal titles.
3. The Importance of Indexing
The computerized database of various disciplines and sub-disciplines in the form of journals, periodicals, monographs and marketing and financial data has revolutionized searching history and empowered the user to peruse through millions of records pertaining to any word or subject and summon onto the screen the invented micro-digs. However, this convenience is available only when searchers are arrested by some key data capable of describing the content of whatever today is “published”. Until today dissemination of knowledge was not easy or convenient, even though the supply was relatively limited. Apparently, before 1960, no more than 4191 periodicals existed in English, and among them, 2911 specialized in some aspect of science and technology. Besides, mainly the abstracts of the journal had a universal application.
The heart of this community has been the men and women who contribute their creative genius to the encyclopedia of our day, the research publications. Fearful that the works in progress – large and small will be forgotten, buried in a monoculture of accumulating technology, these persons endeavor to see that such studies are diverse not only in titles, authorship, agencies, and sponsors, and yet also in topics and themes. Can it be made available to others? Will they share its visions? To those novice studies contemplating inclusion in a research publication, perhaps, the most serious consideration is what society will be interested, what searchers will look for it! Stranger still, since either the course or final report might be on the service’s private menu of specialized subjects, how will it be indexed? After all, we must assume that indexing is quite an essential process, which is partially subject or audience dependent. Since questions on a writer's mind become critical in determining numerous the quality, thoroughness, timing, and expense of indexing, searchers themselves could well benefit from reviewing what these writers ponder when they contemplate choosing an indexer.
3.1. Criteria for Indexing
The growth of literature has led to the growth of many journals in print and electronic forms, which are not peer-reviewed, and do not follow uniform standards of quality and integrity. To provide good quality information to researchers, several organisations and databases have created standards and requirements for indexing of journals, which can be broadly classified as content criteria, usage criteria, and formal criteria. Standards are drawn to assess the quality of the journals that are most frequently used by the researchers in their papers and the bibliometric rules, as well as expected by the research funding bodies and the institutions that promote and assess research. These differ based on the field of science and discipline. Journal guidelines evolve over time based on the changes in the relevant academic disciplines and priorities, modes of research, communication and dissemination, and the local context.
Indexed scholarly journals are characterized by an effective editorial board, a clearly defined aim and scope, authorship by recognized experts, an established peer review process, a sizable non-repetitive readership, a consistent and transparent publication schedule, publication of innovative theoretical, experimental, and review papers; appropriate manuscript formatting and structure, copy editing, proofreading and quality printing, integrity with plagiarism and publication ethics, a consistent impact factor and citation index, publication of discourse on controversial issues in the field, regular updating, efficient journal website, institutional support, recognition by research funding agencies, journal management through membership or subscription, ensure compliance with copyright legislation and other uniform and regulatory standards. Protocols related to these requirements are implemented as a prerequisite for approval and inclusion of journals in databases, and regular monitoring of operations and processes ensure compliance; failure to do so can result in delisting.
3.2. Impact Factor and Its Significance
The impact factor is a rough method of measuring journal influence, by compiling a quotient of the number of times articles have been cited in a particular time frame, divided by the number of citable articles in the journal. For example, if a journal published 200 articles during that period, and there were 100 citations to those articles, its impact factor would be 0.5. While this is a simple, and fairly widely accepted method of quantifying usage, it does have shortcomings. It fails to address key issues, such as the following: the impact factor primarily measures a journal’s influence in the science community, and does not indicate any social impact of the research, nor does it measure the degree of innovation in research, both of which can be achieved by individual articles; many important social science topics may never gain attention from citation indexes, but may have a significant impact on society; each journal serves a different size community, and it would not be logical to use the same scale to measure both the impact of a journal like Nature, which has an Impact Factor exceeding of 20.
Another concern with the impact factor as a method of measuring the importance of individual journals is its failure to address differences in publishing practices of various fields of study. A clearly defined time pattern is employed by the physical, biological and biomedical disciplines, but such a clear sequence may not be available for journals in the social and behavioral disciplines. Also, the coverage of journals is unequal, with many more articles in biology and medical journals than in social science journals. While social scientists do rely heavily on journal literatures, they typically source a greater proportion of their references through books.
4. Research Dissemination Strategies
Research dissemination refers to how research is communicated to a broader audience beyond academic and scientific communities. While the language we use to communicate to our peers will often differ from that used to communicate to the public, the information we relay should be considered equally important regardless of audience. The dissemination and implementation of research are often considered together, not least because without dissemination, implementation cannot occur. Research findings can also be disseminated back to the communities that provided the knowledge that informed the research. A primary aim of the scientific community is to grow a body of research evidence that has maximum societal benefit and captures the knowledge of society.
Traditionally, much of the available research evidence has been communicated in peer-reviewed journals, with models of publishing that are primarily subscription-based. In the last decade, there has been a move away from this model and, some might argue, for good reason. Promotion and tenure in academia have long relied on journal publications, but for the last several decades, the overall trend has been a reduction in the proportion of articles that are read or cited, prompting more serious reconsideration of the practices and incentives around publication. Without citation impact, journals have little justification for their existence, other than prestige – and even prestige lies in producing work that is influential and highly visible. Prestigious journals cannot publish all or even most outstanding papers without undermining the primal importance of elite status, and so interesting trade-offs shape the choices of authors, journals, and readers, resulting in a stratified ecology of journals.
4.1. Traditional vs. Modern Dissemination
Research dissemination is the sharing of research findings with the community, peer researchers, policy makers, and research participants. It is not to be seen as an event or happening, but more as part of the whole research process. It is a continuous process that starts with planning it at the conception of the research project, building capacity and ability to translate, transfer and use research findings, working closely with stakeholders, while the research is ongoing and ends with the feedback from the dissemination process to be used in future research. It involves a variety of diverse stakeholders: researchers; participants who helped with the data by submitting to questionnaires, exposing during interviews, experiments or focus groups; the scientific community; practitioners who can implement the findings; decisionmakers who can influence the development and/or endorsement of policies; and healthcare managers who can assist with the operations of the delivery system.
Dissemination is important because, although research has the potential to influence policy, practice, and service development, such impacts are often not realized. Behind this missed opportunity lies the recognition that in many instances, stakeholders have not been engaged in the research lifecycle— from healthcare question formulation to design, implementation, and evaluation—particularly in evaluating topics of local interest or working in a local context. It is therefore vital that researchers give careful consideration to dissemination of their work throughout the research process to ensure that the utmost potential impact is achieved in the most efficient manner. In the context of modern dissemination, simply publishing research papers in indexed journals is not enough. While academic journals have become the most credible and dependable source of reported research knowledge, true dissemination is about communicating the scientific message to diverse and non-traditional audiences, in both accessible and usable ways.
4.2. Role of Open Access
Modern dissemination, especially through the web, has introduced the concept of Open Access to research outputs, which shifted research dissemination from a focus on advertising or exposing work to the act of letting people use and build upon what researchers have done, without embargos or price barriers. While Open Access initiatives started in the world of biomedical sciences, they have broadened to provide free access to research outputs in other disciplines, particularly humanities and social sciences. The discipline in which work is produced determines the type of archive or repository usually used.
In the social sciences, due to the nature of data used and to the research outputs themselves, it is not common to have data archives. More possible are preprints, which have been adopted in some social sciences and are more commonplace in the natural and formal sciences; and postprints or versions of record, which are the main outputs in which researchers engage in open access in the humanities and social sciences. Since it is difficult to choose a repository when speaking about social sciences research outputs, the focus will be on Open Access journals.
In addition to several disciplinary research databases, which provide links to local open repositories but do not host research outputs themselves, there are also specialized Open Access journals that circulate through different indexing systems. Reputable indexing systems guarantee quality to research outputs and provide researchers with different channels to diffuse their results. In some disciplines, the decentralized journal system even within indexing services, which constantly vanishes, replaces and moves around journals launched by researchers’ colleagues but forgotten by their colleagues within newer incentive systems, who quickly forget but also forget to use the oldest journals, do not discourage an even larger flow of research outputs. They even guarantee coverage of an even larger percentage of research outputs in indexed journals.
5. Benefits of Publishing in Indexed Journals
One of the key benefits of publishing in indexed journals is the visibility and reach that indexed journals have. Publications in indexed journals provide greater visibility for the research findings as indexed journals are included in the search databases used widely by researchers. These publications, therefore, have a higher chance of getting noticed, which can help the authors and the institutions associated with them. Further, indexed journals also have higher reader reach, as they are usually available online. The journals maintain a vast archives of content published over the years and can be found through searches over the years to come. Also, many of the journals are indexed by search databases that cover a wide range of subjects or are indexed in the subject search databases used by researchers from specific fields. These are some of the reasons why many authors prefer to publish their work in indexed journals.
Indexed journals are known to have rigorous peer review processes for the articles accepted for publication, which ensures academic integrity. The peer review process allows the scientific community to critically evaluate the quality of the research, thereby imparting a level of quality assurance to the research findings. This also prevents the publication of poor quality research in high-profile journals, as the findings thus published should matter to a wider audience outside the circle of experts in the same field. Further, if any flaws found after publication in indexed journals, the publication can be retracted at any time, and notifications can be sent to the readers of the research to safeguard them against unreliable advice or guidance based upon the published research. Additionally, indexed journals are also known to have strict publication ethics that are enforced in order to maintain the academic integrity of the journals.
5.1. Visibility and Reach
Journals that are included in indices tend to have a broader scope and a larger reader and researcher base, allowing for cross-linking and increased likelihood of being discovered through web searching. In short, accepted articles in indexed journals are vastly more visible than those in other journals. This visibility tends to be convincing for researchers when they intend to submit their work to journals; those who aim more for the potential reader pool than their specific audience tend to make that choice. Authors published in these journals are also mentored for that succinct level of expressible knowledge valuable to both generalists and specialists, as the articles are typically concise, easy to read, and well organized. In addition to the journals’ overall larger reach, some, due to their indexation, are becoming the first in the specific field that possess a larger subject-area readership. Their editorial boards are composed of domain-relevant experts, so that all work—including articles, citations, and metrics—relating to those fields can be found, if desired, in one specific location. Because article discoverability goes beyond what is in-library, also referenced articles and journal article archives are now finding their way into the index. Although library full-text access may not be available to everyone, the research community tends to be forgiving of that seeming exclusivity due to the journals’ higher-quality article content. However, any document not free to access will likely still be disregarded by at least 60% of researchers.
5.2. Peer Review Process
Introduction: The Role of Indexed Journals and Indexation in Peer Review Process
Peer review is an essential quality-control mechanism that validates the quality and credibility of published work. Given that the quality of research inherently depends on the quality of research publications, journals subject to rigorous quality checks are considered reliable and can be relied on to publish quality research. Research published in such journals can be accepted with confidence and their findings can be used to utilize the research. Indexed journals are included in well-established scientific citation index databases and publish relevant research that uses standardized processes to publish high-quality research. These journals are also known to possess values that benefit researchers and the discipline.
The peer review is a critical process that improves the quality of the work being published. It is a system whereby the editor of the journal sends out the submitted paper to suitable referees for evaluation. The referees, who are experts in the related field, suggest whether the paper should be accepted, rejected, or should be revised before resubmitting. Based on the referees' comments, the editor makes a decision about the work. What happens behind the scenes after journal submission is key to the value an indexed journal adds to research and a vote of confidence in the work being published. The entire process is meant to improve the published product and ensure it stands up to scrutiny. Such rigorous checks make indexed journals more valuable and cited and their work more credible. Being published in such journals reflects positively on the researchers as well as associated institutions.
5.3. Academic Recognition
These are essential for a career in academia and beyond. International scientific production registers growth, with more than 3 million English-language articles being published annually, which represents an increase of over 200% in the last 25 years. However, scientific production equity is still a matter of concern given that certain countries are responsible for 60% of these publications. In this context, journals indexed in international bases of high standards become value sources, contributing to a greater distribution, visibility and recognition of a researcher’s expertise.
There is an important statistical correlation between a research institution’s recognition level and the participation of its researchers in publications indexed in international bases. Graduate programs and research groups in Brazil are increasingly judged by their involvement in international indexed journal publications. By doing research in specific areas, researchers tend to acquire a greater notoriety and expert recognition from the scientific community. Academic recognition can also benefit collaborative research with other researchers or institutions. Many fundings for scientific projects are offered by government departments or private organizations aiming at improving a community or society’s quality of life and, as a direct consequence, engendering research linked to internationalized groups, helping overcome possible technologic deficiencies in research.
6. Challenges Faced by Researchers
Although their role in disseminating research is vital, indexed journals still pose some challenges to researchers. These are, among others, publication bias and access barriers.
6.1. Publication Bias
A major downside to publishing in indexed journals is that certain researchers may not have their findings reach a wider audience. Many indexed journals accept only experimental research for publishing — that is, studies that test a hypothesis or investigate a problem through clinical trial. In behavioral research, this is considered limiting, since there are several valuable studies that may use qualitative analysis, meta-analysis, historical and theoretical analysis, program description, or case studies methods that can all contribute to the field. However, many of such methods are deemed of lesser status or less valid, and researchers are therefore discouraged from utilizing them.
6.2. Access Barriers
Another challenge is accessibility. Researchers —particularly early-career ones in the developing world or those at institutions lacking institutional subscriptions— may face serious barriers to access index journals from subscription-based publishers and find themselves excluded from the latest evidence and discoveries. These issues are compounded in low-income settings with limited budgets, where universities and research institutions struggle to access any scholarly output. Subscription costs and pay-per-view fees associated with readers wishing to view full articles, along with the hefty author publication charges imposed by open access publishers, often prohibitively prevent researchers and students from accessing the information needed to inform the work.
6.1. Publication Bias
While the increased access to research findings via electronic submission has enabled researchers from developing and transitional economies to benefit from published research, other barriers may still inhibit their ability to disseminate and access fundamental research. Publication bias occurs when the outcome of a research study influences the decision whether to publish it. For example, studies that have positive, significant results are more likely to be published, thus influencing decisions to author further research, seek funding and apply for ethics clearance. In the medical field, specific journals may publish a higher number of studies with positive results, thus skewing the correct interpretation of the actual knowledge surrounding the topic. Researchers from all fields are encouraged to publish "negative" results to contribute to a more balanced field of research. This challenge is countered in indexed journals through their rigorous peer review processes and the availability of online journal publishing, allowing for the acceptance and publication of studies with negative or inconsistent findings that add to the broader knowledge within the field.
The majority of journals in the publishing group list articles longer than the overall minimum required limits to qualify as negative or inconsistent results. The bulk of the evidence exists with the longest articles. Almost all of the articles in this group are also "first" results, as there are very few "full" replications of previous research conducted, let alone attempts at "partial" replications. The "first" results bias can lead to a failure of the scientific method, as the foundational requirement of independent supporting work is thus not achieved. The focus must thus be on encouraging researchers to disseminate all findings, with the understanding that they contribute equally to the enhancement of knowledge.
6.2. Access Barriers
Barriers to access amplify access issues caused by scientific publication fees. Although openly accessible and free highly accessed publications are present, it has been reported that most scientific publications remain paywalled. A researcher publishing a highly accessed publication who is not affiliated with the research institution may not have access to the document, although it is openly accessible, once it is published in any regular journal and is no longer on any preprint servers. Also, if a researcher is associated with the variety of developing countries where lower subscription fees are charged, this would only defer paywall barriers to the long term, whilst the access charge remains exorbitant. The openly available copy found on the publisher’s site during the free window for access would become an additional funding requirement if the researcher needs access at a later point of time.
With the generous campaign by some traditional publishers for free and open accessibility of the publications during the pandemic, it was hoped that this might lead to an increase of such practice, perhaps with some time delay with the earlier imposed paywalls. Yet, the experiences of the past few months of the pandemic reveal that any free availability during specific conditions in a crisis cannot be an expectation imposed on publishers, and furthermore in other crisis periods such as natural disasters, the ubiquitous availability of scientific knowledge seemed to be unrealistic. Publication authorization requests on social media illustrated that researchers were frequently requesting copies of publications in vain search for appropriate scholars who might be able to provide requested publications, or the coauthor access routes, although formally illegal. Therefore, the message and lesson learnt seem to be that researchers need to explore alternative viewpoints regarding alternative efficient structural systems, as scientific publications seem to have ended up being in the currently proposed and functioning subscription system.
7. The Role of Technology in Journal Indexing
In recent times, technology has enhanced productivity in almost all spheres of life. Technology-induced breakthroughs have made our work easier, quicker, and more productive. Publishing research articles in indexed journals offers academic recognition for researchers and helps improve collective knowledge. When technology assists in this process, it enhances our belief in its importance and contribution. Of late, journals are increasingly utilizing digital platforms. Having a digital interface allows for easy sharing and improved visibility, which makes research available for further developments. While a printed journal could be seen as scripture, a journal present on the web could be cut, edited, and redrafted by hundreds or thousands of people over the years. Researchers start up digital platforms to share and promote their work through thoughtful online connecting. Their association with such platforms further enhances credibility and importance. It offers large exposure and immediate and transformative feedback in the form of comments, which could be used to improve the work. Indexed journals are now expecting researchers to share their work through such platforms. Doing so offers credibility and authenticity and pushes up the index rankings. The requirement to share work stimulates interaction, and discomfort from negative comments pushes researchers to further improve their work.
Journals need to harness data analytics to extract intelligence from a myriad of often-disparate datasets and make informed decisions. Therefore, the high-level vision of the Smart Journal practice for the next decade is to use Artificial Intelligence and other algorithm-based submissions, reviewing, editing, production, and publishing processes. This would free researchers from time-consuming and tedious review tasks and also allow researchers working in high-regulatory domains to maintain quality assurance. Data-driven methodologies and intention-definition technology can establish standards and specific metrics regarding issues of inherent novelty, uniqueness, comprehensiveness, and other ethical and research best-practice goals. Journals can then apply wisdom-based methodologies to provide value-added informative processes for researchers in special domains.
7.1. Digital Platforms
The role of technology in journal indexing can be understood by way of the novel digital platforms for information submission, discovery, management, and access, that have been developed over time. These systems have their roots in earlier shared data repositories developed by researchers for their peer communities. They have been perfected over the years and are now all commercially owned. Smaller, specialty repositories continue to be developed and launched by researchers for their peer community's use. Some of these repository services function both as social networking sites for researchers, as well as content repositories for sharing research workflow information and findings at all levels of scholarly output. Smaller, not-for-profit initiatives help support unique researcher processes. While new generation underdeveloped collaborative data sharing, discovery, and access platforms reduce the need for journal intermediation during the research dissemination event, they also mesh in interesting ways with many commercial and not-for-profit index services. These journal services play a key role in helping support researchers by collecting, filtering, validating, and organizing the shared output of multiple disciplines in a collaborative way, as they help accelerate the pace of research innovation. They essentially offer their own specialized answer to two questions asked by serious students, practitioners, and the interested public at large: "How do I find the best scholarly source information on a particular topic?" and "How do I validate the quality of the research presented in open resources?" The relationships among commercial journals and commercial indexers have evolved together in kind.
7.2. Data Analytics in Research
The headline of this section could not seem more relevant in today’s research world, where experimental analysis of data and statistical inferences play a fundamental, absolutely core role in almost all scientific domains. The concept of data analytics could be widely discussed in many different ways; a definitive answer to the question "What is data analytics?" is relatively complex, however the popularization of learning algorithms has made the research and applied community more sensitive to more lasting and pervasive definitions of the topic. Because reporting and working on numbers is common practice across any experimental scientist, it should seem quite obvious that journals which are strictly devoted to reporting research using quantitative approaches could be natural leaders in allocating space for data analytics. The use of numerical data has supported real breakthroughs in medical research, social and political research, decision science, marketing science, management science, among others. The list of journals in the respective fields is widely long; only to mention a few, the Journal of Statistical Research, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, Journal of Official Statistics, Journal of Applied Statistics, Statistics in Medicine, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Journal of Statistical Theory and Applications, Journal of Statistical Software, Journal of Data Science, Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, are all journals whose role in AV is undeniable, as the use of computational tools and formal models pervades the research published in those specific areas.
8. Case Studies of Indexed Journals
There are over 42,000 journals available in various disciplines, of which approximately 15 percent are indexed in the core and the rest in non-core databases. Indexed journals are perceived to provide value-added services like editorial services and manuscript review to the authors and the scientific community alike. Large number of quality journals enable researchers to reach a broader audience. However, there is always growth in niche or emerging areas as they could address a issue faced by the community recently. Authors interested in niche dominance might submit to these journals for higher chances of dominating the area and addressing the niche questions.
8.1. High-Impact Journals
The objective of this case study is to analyze the differences between high-impact journals and the rest indexed for both natural and social sciences. The query revealed that among the 11,000 journals indexed, about 1200 journals are high-impact in both natural and social sciences. Out of these, about 600 are common, while 800 are in natural sciences and 200 in social sciences. Interestingly, out of these high-impact journals, 70 percent are owned by commercial publishers reflecting the market-centric approach towards high-impact journals. The study also revealed that while about 75 percent of articles published come from high-impact journals, the rest score only 25 percent of total bibliometric score.
8.2. Emerging Journals in Specific Fields
This case study on recently interpreted significant or top-cited journals provides an insight into the dynamics of their growth. The case study focuses on a specific research area, namely, the pharmaceutical sciences, as it is ever-changing in nature. Merging journals perceived to operate as a regulatory resource to stabilize and orderly the constituent structure of a field. Moreover, their varying numbers and positions are indicative of developments in the domain. In the study, visualizations of three maps of the pharmaceutical sciences are calibrated. The maps consist of all peer-reviewed journals as considered their number and citation activities in the research area. The study concludes by discussing a selection of research-related implications in fields like the pharmaceutical sciences.
8.1. High-Impact Journals
Many of the best-known, highest-impact journals are long-established and deeply entrenched in their fields. A full description of any of these would carry us too far afield: publish work from a wide range of fields, including physics, cell biology, and the physical sciences, but most especially in the area of cutting-edge “discovery”; among those in the biomedical sciences, rely heavily on clinical research, as does the top-ranked journal, which turns out more than 50 issues per year; the official journal of also publishes many multidisciplinary papers; in the area of the clinical study of basic biology; from the biology of type II diabetes to the molecular basis of the complex disease known as cancer; and from the molecular mechanisms that drive healthy aging to the effects of microbial communities on host metabolism, effect of bone marrow on the hematopoietic stem cells that are critical in the treatment of certain diseases.
High-impact journals play a number of important roles in scholarly research communication—roles that have shifted as the fields themselves have changed. Many now function as professional societies for their parent fields, with news and opinion features that fulfill a mission of serving all aspects of their communities; others provide forums for academic job advertisements, and still others sponsor meetings that have become ground zero for dealing with particular research topics. Their primary role, of course, continues to be that of discovery. The most important purpose of high-impact journals is to publish breakthrough or transformative research. These are studies that alter the future direction of research, opening up new fields and methodologies for discovery, or that trigger major shifts in understanding and practice.
8.2. Emerging Journals in Specific Fields
It is important for a research discipline to also have specific niche journals for topics germane to that discipline even if those journals are not indexed by commercial indexers. Indexed journals in a discipline tend to follow a specific publishing model; tend to publish certain classes of papers; and have a set community of authors, reviewers, and editors. A researcher looking for a specialized topic, or trying to publish in a nascent area, may find that indexed journals in their discipline do not accept their class of papers or have a long publication turn-around time. Similarly, a new author may find it difficult to get published in high-impact journals at the start of their career. There is also a large body of research that tends to address localized problems, on which citation counts cannot be depended upon to measure relevance or significance.
While this appears to be the case with many scientific disciplines, emerging research fields do not have high-impact, established journals. These journals are still in the process of developing a specific scope and audience. For example, several energy-transition journals are linked to the specific energy source they study; are tied to a specific research area in the energy transition domain; publish papers from a narrow range of research topics; and accept papers, often, without the thorough review undertaken by mainstream indexed journals.
9. Future Trends in Research Dissemination
The world of academic publishing is undergoing a great deal of change. As scientific and technological innovation multiplies, so do the opportunities for new forms and modalities of publishing. Researchers and academics demand greater speed; funding bodies demand greater impact from research efforts; institutions demand greater visibility of their research outputs so they can better meet the increase in competition for limited resources; society demands greater access to the research and knowledge outputs funded through tax contributions, while generations of students and established researchers alike, now accustomed to the immediacy and convenience of information access, and in need of diverse formats, are simply not prepared to wait weeks or months for research to be made available. The traditional model of professional publishing — where content is put through a time-consuming cycle of peer review, copy-editing, typesetting and printing — may no longer be sustainable.
How will these conflicting pressures play out? Will we see a proliferation of commercial publishers, jostling together in a crowded marketplace with rapid-response packing and distribution networks? Or will we see a more cohesive approach to the new possibilities afforded by the future trends in online dissemination? Broader trends in access and dissemination are simplistically categorized into two opposing futures: open content initiatives, and the gradual embedding of dissemination into everyday research practice. Preprint servers and scholarly social networks are two initiatives best positioned to broaden access and embed dissemination, and these are discussed in more detail below.
9.1. The Rise of Preprint Servers
A preprint is a version of a scholarly paper that precedes formal peer review and publication in a scientific journal. Preprints are often posted on a publicly accessible website, known as a preprint repository or preprint server. In addition to the availability of a version prior to peer review, these preprint repositories typically serve other purposes, including facilitating access to a wider audience, both in academia and the public; facilitating collaboration and discussion among academics prior to peer review; allowing non-academics to comment on the research; and making sure that credit can be claimed quickly for research. Among the many advantages offered by preprint servers, the most touted is the speed with which researchers can publish their papers. Preprint servers are now a common exchange for life sciences and physics researchers and are increasingly being embraced by other fields, with others wobbling en route. The leading preprint servers in each field are openly accessible. Although some journals have relatively warm relationships with certain preprint servers, they have little or no relations with others.
Most recognized fields of study have preprint servers, which have been growing in popularity in scientific circles. One of the earliest and perhaps the most famous, serves the physics and mathematics communities; others have been developed for economics, biological preprints, and psychology. Even some medical journals now post preprints. An increasing number of researchers now choose to post preprints of their papers online prior to their journal publication.
9.2. Collaborative Research Networks
Collaborative Research Networks are nexus points that focus on specific areas of research activity and bring together co-researchers and technical personnel working on a common problem or theme. The network may function for the researchers as a central clearinghouse for research papers, presentations, FAQs, papers under development, discussions, and e-mail lists. The network provides an archive of paper submissions and discussion points and allows interested visitors to browse and search the archive. The founding members select concrete goals for the network and develop policies and protocols guiding network growth, content, and interactivity. Collaborative Research Networks provide these facilities as a method of conducting research and as a product of research. Research is conducted at the network site, the network is the primary product, and the networks generate awareness and interest in research being conducted by all members.
The specific technology is unimportant; other forms support this activity, such as the recently popularized blog and wiki approaches. The pitched idea is that only a limited set of infrastructures can work at any time for the Web to be informative to not only researchers but also the wannabe researchers. There is an overarching danger of too many networks for too little use; however, for now this is a desirable danger. Other companies have lowered barriers and put up websites addressing the same space. These platforms provide a space for researchers to share academic papers, search for papers related to their interest, and create an e-mail alert. The downside of such a corporate while open site is reliance on an entity that is monetizing what should be a public resource. If created by academics for academics, such a proprietary site would have better been acceptable.
10. Ethics in Research Publishing
10. Ethics in Research Publishing. The “scientific process” as we know it involves the generation of new knowledge with a huge resource investment from researchers, often working over long timescales. The publication of results is key to unlocking any further investment in that work, be it via public policy decisions or new funding opportunities that are contingent on the success of the original efforts. Publications convey the quality of the science – how well it was executed and how well the results were reported. So tied together is a research finding with its publication that constructing better journals and indexing systems is often seen as an important mechanism for elevating the quality of the science as a whole. Given this context, it is imperative that both the researchers and the publishers of research maintain certain ethical standards, not only to increase the credibility of an individual finding but also to ensure that the research ecosystem runs smoothly and trust in the system from other participants is maintained.
Ethics in publishing conduct can typically be classified into four groups: publication misconduct, transparency, affiliation and funding disclosure, and conflict of interest disclosure. The first are instances of research misconduct that describable biases between actual and reported work, and range from the benign data selection, cherry-picking of results from larger datasets to report exaggeratedly large effect sizes, through to clearly unethical classification practices and model selection, and fabrication and falsification of results. The importance of careful reporting practices in the field of Psychology, and reports and scandals over reproducibility of effects therein, has already led to the establishment of guidelines for pre-registration of experimental protocols, sample size considerations, and transparency in result reporting.
10.1. Plagiarism and Misconduct
Papers are published to disseminate new knowledge and research to a wider audience and that audience must have confidence in the declarations made by the authors of those papers. This can be for many reasons such as plagiarism, unethical research practices, or fraudulent research findings. Some disciplinary areas are more prone to some of these issues than others but all disciplines are likely to suffer from at least one of these issues affecting one paper or another.
Plagiarism can take many forms. It may involve a complete duplicate paper being submitted to more than one journal and these are often flagged during the submission process by the journal submission software systems that are commonly used. But it is often not straightforward to detect more subtle forms of plagiarism, including the wholesale copying of entire sections from other papers. It is time-consuming to identify these papers using the current existing software and for the most part, it is the job of an eagle-eyed editor or referee that identifies such papers which are often based in disciplines that are particularly prone to publishing papers in bulk that cover little new research. Even when a paper has been flagged as plagiarized, the decision of whether it is actually plagiarized is often left to the editor. The consequences of plagiarizing are often dependent on the actions of the specific discipline, institution, or even the country that these actions are discovered in, and in the worst-case scenario, may involve the withdrawal of at least one of the involved papers from the journal, as with much of the shady bulk publishing practices that are often seen in some journals.
10.2. Transparency in Research
Any ethical guidelines for research publishing surely point towards transparency in research. This includes both reporting of the research being conducted and thus what work is novel and important as well the open sharing ecosystems that support it.
Transparency in the conduct of research has many forms. The most familiar perhaps is making research data openly available. The movement towards larger and larger data sets to power AI/ML systems, for example, has pointed towards the need for industry to also be transparent. For peer reviewed research, data repositories for sharing data sets associated with papers are an increasingly important part of the publication services that journals offer. Changing pressure due to access and data protection laws have added to the original forerunners of DNA sharing in the evolution of raw data sharing. Growing pains are, of course, involved as researchers navigate this need to deal with what data is included, and what is not, questions of anonymization of privacy-protecting tokens and formats, and as reviewers develop a new norm often falling short of requiring careful checking of such data and its usage in a paper, and their impact on the validity of the findings. The p-hacking epidemic that engulfed psychology and similar behavioral sciences, along with the irreproducibility crisis, have pushed scientists towards these principles as the practices that can help validate findings through many simulated replications, and give researchers confidence that they can explore the limits of these principles in new domains in a valid manner.
11. Global Perspectives on Indexed Journals
11.1. Regional Differences in Access
Institutional support for open and community development builds on the accessibility of research to academics from countries with limited capacity for research, funded in part by other nations. Any unrestrained access to research work is especially important to institutions or individuals from developing nations. This importance is often not reciprocated. Furthermore, there is a marked inequality whereby institutions affiliated with Western nations are the ones generally capable of footing the funding for access to research findings. As a result of this exaggerated imbalance, rising requests for “pay-per-view” from nations with lesser capabilities result in editorial attempts to create a fairly disbursed balance of research capabilities. A less favourably described effect of access and support becoming asymmetrical is a drop in work received from an institution whose financial ability to handle requests has slowed collaborative relationships. E-journal subscription support has been highlighted at a symposium on open access, where it was noted that while an increasing number of research papers are available with no access fees in numerous sciences disciplines, there is still a heavy need for producing funds for many journals, along with special issues and publications, particularly at a level that will balance the production of work from both developing and developed nations.
11.2. International Collaboration
The means for a linking collaboration of research interests is further accentuated by the development of technology. This mode produces, in turn, a widening of focus and depth of knowledge surrounding a core area of investigation. The collaborative aspect of indexation is reinforced by the new global information community formed, as well as the free sharing of information encompassed. The process advances beyond a simple duality of country capabilities since the first example of collaboration considered becomes more differentiated; for example, topic or level of investigation compared to another country, and the relative ability of a research team from a second country to contribute to a Sub-International area of research, relative to the original research team or to the partnership as a whole.
11.1. Regional Differences in Access
Among all existing scientific journals, only a small fraction of them is indexed in well-known databases. The large majority of scientific journals in all disciplines are not indexed in any database, making it impossible for the new search engines to find scientific articles produced by researchers working in poorly developed regions. Especially when it comes to fields such as natural sciences, physical sciences, life sciences, medical and health sciences or engineering and technology; the absence of indexed journals in these areas of knowledge has made it very difficult for researchers from specific regions to find adequate channels to disseminate their findings.
In poor countries, by the opposite of the plentiful of indexed channels found in developed nations, scholars working there don’t have very much choice and as a consequence, the vast majority of their articles are published in non-indexed journals. A similar investigation was carried out for Latin America in which large-scale datasets were examined regarding the Brazilian scientific communications diffusion. The search revealed an infrastructure of scientific communication vehicles; from those, a significant percentage are not indexed or categorized in international databases. These are postal channels, just additional vehicles to the transmission of articles, being released without control by any intelligent quality node, and these articles are located mainly in posting sites, as well as societies and institutions.
11.2. International Collaboration
In response to the constraints posed by concentrating national-level research funding into larger-scale exercises which often favour work which is not nationally of interest, researchers from smaller countries may look to collaborate with others elsewhere in the world. Such collaboration can be particularly successful if it follows a model termed Mode 2. In this model, researchers from disparate communities who are engaged not only in the academic research process, but also involved in the wider application of that research working together, they create networks of excellence which span not only countries, but continents. The foundation of such collaborations sits within the research effort: the 'research product', hence the exchange of research outputs in a visible way that is common across the collaborating parties, becomes important.
Scholarly communications plays an essential part in such collaborative research not only in terms of the establishment of the collaboration, through the often-cited route of 'cited by' for the relevant earlier work, but also as a means of timely feedback on results from the work-in-progress by publication in the highly visible research platform chosen by the collaborating team. It is an established phenomenon that the parties to a collaboration will tend to publish on a joint basis more frequently than on a single-party basis: the reason for this is the commonality of investment in the research effort by all parties, together with the efficiency of the collaborative communications model. In such circumstances, the focus for productivity comparisons should be placed upon the level of joint publications generated relative to the indexed volume of output by the individual parties.
12. Evaluating the Quality of Indexed Journals
12.1. Journal Metrics
Academic librarians put considerable effort into building and managing scholarly databases and repositories that meet the information needs of their patrons. Unfortunately, this process can promote informatics that have little in common with library or end-user needs. For example, commercial companies and academic publishers report citation metrics, but indexing databases allow us to see selected journals rated by established criteria. There are several such lists that measure particular features of journals, such as citation counts. They are also subject to substantial error and manipulation. The end user needs to ask whether a journal published in a field has measurable attributes that are seen as desirable in the parent field and at which discovery phase. There are a series of articles that one could read to see how citation counts have been misused. Most people would also probably agree that a journal with many published articles in total should have more overall citations and that journals in specialized niche areas are likely to have fewer articles, fewer citations, and thus lower ratios of citations/article or similar.
Journal metrics are generally thought of as citation counts, but there are other, non-citation metric-based measures available. In most fields, blue chip journals are those that have been promoting the dissemination of the relevant research for many years, and are the journals in which your successful colleagues publish and which changes which fields are ranked. Most people in a field consider the blue-chip journals for their research, especially for critical aspects of them. Such perception is due to historical reputation as well as measures of discoveries and their significance more recently. Judging reputation has some subjective aspects, but so do citation counts when they are interpreted, weighted, and rated.
12.2. Reputation and Trustworthiness
A growing body of evidence indicates that people are more likely to trust reputation more than repeated calculated assessments. Many researchers trust their colleagues’ opinions and judgments to guide them regarding what they consider reputable journals for input on the quality of their assessments. While this assumption might allow someone to reflect on their academic upbringing and the influences that guided them in creating their own menu of journals, their relevance for one specific project or aspect should be paramount. In summary, metrics will provide a useful guideline to the user of scholarly outputs, researchers working in scholarly outputs, as well as systems performing recommendations or trust values to journal articles and authors should also rely on reputation to accurately assess research quality in a specific area and to guide them in their discovery.
12.1. Journal Metrics
Metrics play a key role in a researcher’s peer review process. The impact factor remains the metric most widely used by researchers in making decisions regarding their publishing. However, the continued prominence of the impact factor in journal metric discussions has resulted in a lack of awareness about other useful alternative metrics providing even more useful journal evaluations, especially when used in combination. Evaluating journals by using a breadth of quantitative and qualitative metrics goes beyond simply asking about the journal’s impact; it provides a fuller picture of the journal’s reputation and trustworthiness.
The impact factor of a journal is a ratio between citations of the journal in the present year and the total number of articles published in the prior two years. This means that a journal that published a relatively large number of articles in the last two years but had moderately high citations could have a very low impact factor, and thus may not rank highly based on this metric alone. Alternatively, journals that may not publish a large number of articles but had more citations could have a higher impact factor. Nonetheless, the impact factor alone should not be trusted implicitly without examining the other factors, especially with the ongoing concerns about the accuracy of the database in estimating the impact factor — sometimes erroneously treating conference proceedings, poorly-cited journals, and so on as credible journals when calculating the impact factor.
12.2. Reputation and Trustworthiness
For a long time now, the majority of researchers have relied on editorial boards, partnerships, and related factors to assess the trustworthiness and reputation of a journal, and a journal’s reputation has been the measuring stick for how serious or ethical a journal is. There are still those who think it is too difficult to assess indexation or similar metrics and to create other, new measures or tools. There are those journals that often appear named in different sources when searching to find specific journals. They are easy to find since they are indexed in the leading databases. They are also journals that have good editorial governance and follow high-quality standards and practices. When publishing high-quality research outputs or knowledge, researchers seek quality in journals. Researchers want the indexed journals with the most reputation and trustworthiness in their respective fields or areas. Though it is easy to find relevant indexed journals in each respective area, other variables such as years of experience can impact the decision about which indexed journal to choose. Those with more years of experience, for example, probably choose a higher impact journal than recent scholars or researchers who are just starting or who are junior scholars. They may prefer to continue publishing in collaborative journals co-edited by their institutions. Specific venues to disseminate new knowledge with more senior researchers may also influence such choices. These are also venues of relevance for supported collective work building communication networks in each area.
13. Conclusion
This paper emphasizes the fundamental role of indexed journals in disseminating research findings, influencing researchers' decisions regarding where to publish their work and aiding users in their determination of reliable, effective, and accurate sources of scientific knowledge. The scientific community shares an unspoken contract; researchers are expected to validate their assumptions and claims by making their findings public, and indexed journals serve the purpose of collecting, preserving, and making accessible this scholarly work. The results reveal certain features that determine the preference researchers give to indexed journals: evaluation, reliability, conservation, and access.
Research had since long been assumed to rest on a foundation of written accounts of inquiry. It is hoped that the many layers of investigation described here will improve services in areas where they are called upon to act as guides to published research and in doing so will help towards the claim that written accounts of research are central to research activity. The hope is that such guides will prove useful in practical ways to consumer groups. The selection process accounts for the supply of information sources and is seen to many as a chain of procedures. Consumer groups are, then, entrusted with selecting information source supplied by the information professionals. The nature of consumers of written research accounts is a multifaceted issue. It involves various types of user of written research reports, some of whom are the recipients of commissioned research, others who commissioned the research. Various degrees of familiarity with the output and process of research activity along with differences in available time affect how the various types of users appropriate the work of research. Guides to what research gets published and in what form. For the research consumer, the supply of academic articles that have been through an above peer-review process is an important factor in determining the type and number of user groups and the way in which these groups deal with written research accounts.
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