Advanced Psychology Research Guide

• Identify journals in your research area
• Find journal impact factors
• Avoid predatory journals and publishers 
• Determine how many times your article, book, or book chapter has been cited
• Find your article DOIs
• Calculate your H-Index (your research output and impact)

Publish Your Thesis: how to edit and prepare your thesis for publication

The Art of Acceptance: Insights on the publication process

Scaling Mount Publication: It can take years to get your study finished and accepted by a peer-reviewed journal. Here's advice on how to persevere from some of psychology's most productive researchers. 

Get Published: Attaining that first manuscript acceptance takes patience and a thick skin.

Some databases used in Psychology identify journals in their list of search hits that publish in your research areas (as indicated by your search words):

• PsycINFO / PsycARTICLES: Click on Publication under the Refine Results sidebar to the right of your list of search hits
• ScienceDirect: Click on Publication title under the Refine filters sidebar to the right of your list of search hits 
• SpringerLink: Click on Published In under the  Refine Your Search sidebar to the right of your list of search hits

Some journals and conferences are open to including undergraduate work:

• Undergraduate Journals: a list of journals open to publishing undergraduate research
• Undergraduate Presentation Opportunities: a list of conferences that welcome undergraduate presenters or co-presenters

The Journal Citation Reports database provides information about Psychology journals, including their impact factors. From the Journal Citation Reports homepage:

• Enter the name of the journal or the specific subject category for which you want to find impact factors
• Click on Browse categories in the top bar
  • Scroll through the list of categories to Psychiatry/Psychology, then click on the arrow to the right to open all of its subcategories
  • Click on the category to open the list of journals published in that category and their impact factors

The impact factor of a journal is a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year. It is used to measure the importance or rank of a journal by calculating the times it's articles are cited. Impact factor is calculated based on a two-year period and involves dividing the number of times articles were cited by the number of articles that are citable.

See the library's Avoiding Predatory Journal Publications guide for information about what predatory journals are and how to avoid them.

Web of Science calculates how many times your articles or book chapters (published 2005 and later) have been cited:

Use this Free DOI Lookup tool to look up the DOIs of your published articles:

• First Author search only retrieves DOIs for articles for which you were first author
• Use an Article Title search for articles for which you were not the first author
• Not all of your articles will have DOIs, especially any that are more than about 15 years old

The h-index quanitifies an individual’s research output and measures both their productivity and impact. The index is based on a list of publications ranked in descending order by the number of citations these publications received. The value of h is equal to the number of papers (N) in the list that have N or more citations. (J.E. Hirsch, 2005). 

Web of Science calculates your h-index: