Nursing

There are several factors that you need to keep in mind when pursuing publishing opportunities such as:

• Impact Factors
• Immediacy Factors
• Acceptance Rates
• Review Process
• Editors/Sponsoring Organization
• Circulation Numbers
• Where it is indexed in databases

Impact Factors: This ratio will reveal the number of citations divided by the number of articles

Immediacy Factors:

Acceptance Rates: 

Journal acceptance rates can help to reveal important statistical information about the selectivity of a journal.Low acceptance rate, high rejection rate journals are considered the best and most prestigious journals. This information can be found by looking at the journal itself to see if they are listed or by searching the journal's website to see if the information is available on their website.  

Review Process:

Editors:

The prestige and reputation of the association, society, or organization publishing a journal can be a determining factor. In therory, the most prestigious scholarly associations  publish the best, most important, research in the field and therefore their journals have more prestige and weight than others. There are a handful of scholarly journals that are known by reputation throughout the world, such as JAMA, The New England Journal of Medicine, Science and Nature. These scholarly journals are known and read by both people within the scholarly discipline and people outside the scholarly discipline

Circulation: 

This is another method which could be used to assess the quality of a journal. High readership and circulation could be markers of a journal's quality and/or popularity. Circulation numbers can be often be found at the journal publisher's website.

Know Your Rights as the Author

• The author is the copyright holder. As the author of a work, you are the copyright holder unless and until you transfer the copyright to someone else in a signed agreement.
• Assigning your rights matters. Normally, the copyright holder possesses the exclusive rights of reproduction, distribution, public performance, public display, and modification of the original work. An author who has transferred copyright without retaining these rights must ask permission unless the use is one of the statutory exemptions in copyright law.
• The copyright holder controls the work. Decisions concerning use of the work, such as distribution, access, pricing, updates, and any use restrictions belong to the copyright holder. Authors who have transferred their copyright without retaining any rights may not be able to place the work on course Web sites, copy it for students or colleagues, deposit the work in a public online archive, or reuse portions in a subsequent work. That’s why it is important to retain the rights you need.
• Transferring copyright doesn’t have to be all or nothing. The law allows you to transfer copyright while holding back rights for yourself and others. Scrutinized the Publication Agreement
• Read the publication agreement with great care. Publishers’ agreements (often titled “Copyright Transfer Agreement”) have traditionally been used to transfer copyright or key use rights from author to publisher. They are written by publishers and may capture more of your rights than are necessary to publish the work. Ensuring the agreement is balanced and has a clear statement of your rights is up to you.
• Publishing agreements are negotiable. Publishers require only your permission to publish an article, not a wholesale transfer of copyright. Hold onto rights to make use of the work in ways that serve your needs and that promote education and research activities.

This information adapted from SPARC.

Google Scholar Metrics
New in April 2012, Google has released a new journal ranking tool. Rankings display include the h5-index and the h5-median for each included publication.  To learn more about Google Scholar Metrics and its use of h5-index, go to its explanatory page. To search in Google Scholar Metrics, click here and then type in the journal name on top.