Subject Guides: Advanced Psychology Research Guide: Publish Your Research

Publishing Your Research

American Psychological Association Advice

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.

Identifying Journals in your Research Area

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

Finding Journal Impact Factors

Journal Citation Reports: provides information about journals in Psychology, including their impact factors.

Choose JCR Social Sciences Edition from the Journal Citation Reports homepage
On the Subject Category Selection page, choose one or more of the Psychology categories

Identifying Predatory Publishers and Journals

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

Determine How Many Times your Article, Book, or Book Chapter has been cited

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

Enter the name of the author in the top search box (e.g. Smith JT)
Select Author from the drop-down menu to the right of the search box
Click on Search
Times Cited, to the right of each article or book chapter, shows how many times each has been cited

Click on the linked number for a list of works that have cited your article or book chapter

Google Scholar calculates how many times your articles or books (but not book chapters) have been cited:

Open Advanced Search options by clicking on the arrow at the right of the search box
Enter the name of the author in the Return articles authored by search box (e.g. JT Smith)
Cited by, under each article or book chapter, shows how many times each has been cited
Warning: Google Scholar includes duplicates in its Cited by number

Follow these instructions to remove duplicates of your articles or books

Find Your Article DOIs

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

Calculate Your H-Index (your research output and impact)

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:

Enter the name of the author in the top search box (e.g. Smith JT)
Select Author from the drop-down menu to the right of the search box
Click on Search
Click on Citation Report on the right hand corner of the results page

The H-index is on the right of the screen