Visibility

Choosing the right journal helps you reach the right audience for your work to be read, applied, and inform the work of other researchers. The more support a journal offers to help you reach your audience, the better.

Indexing in the major Web of Science and Scopus databases, or subject-specific databases such as Medline, PubMed, Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences International (CABI), International Food Information Service (IFIS) FSTA Journal Database, Chemical Abstracts Service and many others can increase the visibility of your work.

Furthermore, by implementing necessary technical requirements, the journal can significantly contribute to the improved visibility, readability and citability of the published content. Such requirements depend on the software and infrastructure the journal uses and are not easily visible to the researchers. Nevertheless, you can check if the target journal has an article identifier (DOI), author identifier (ORCID) and supports metadata exchange, which can significantly improve the spread of published content in different academic databases, repositories and publishing services.

Beyond academic databases, journals may assist with the promotion of articles on a wider scale, reaching different audiences through a range of strategies, such as social media posting, subject area campaigns, and conference attendance, among other initiatives, which may be an important factor in your decisions of where to submit.

In addition to citation metrics, alternative metric information, such as AltMetric and PlumX, can help you understand the journal’s audience, who they are reaching and how immediately people are engaging with papers. As well as providing insight into the potential visibility a journal can offer your work, altmetric information can show you the audience of readers, adding to your understanding of the aims and scope of the journal, and whether it is suitable for you to submit to.