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Education Research

A guide to starting points in education research at Queen's University, Kingston.

How to Assess a Journal

How to Assess a Journal from the Canadian Association of Research Libraries provides a handy graphic to navigating the the scholarly communications landscape. 

Identifying Deceptive Publishers: A Checklist. Refer to this nationally recognized document from the University of Toronto when you want to verify the reputation of a journal you are evaluating.

The Scholarly Communication Toolkit from the Association of College & Research Libraries (U.S.) gives sound advice for determining journal quality. Use the ACRL's THINK, CHECK, SUBMIT checklist.

Directory of Open Access Journals. DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.

Beall's List of Predatory ​Journals and Publishers.  A (somewhat dated) list of questionable, scholarly open-access publishers.

Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing. These principles were compiled by 4 scholarly organizations concerned with promoting high quality open access publications.

Ulrichsweb.com, Ulrich's Periodicals Directory provides detailed, comprehensive, and authoritative information on journals, magazines, newspapers, and other serials published throughout the world.

Journal Impact

Journal Citation Reports (JCR)

JCR summarises citations from more than 10,000 journals and proceedings in the sciences and social sciences indexed in the Web of Science database.  By compiling articles' cited references, JCR helps to measure research influence and impact at the journal and category levels, and shows the relationship between citing and cited journals.

Master Journal List  Wondering if a title is covered in JCR?  Search by title, keyword and ISSN.

The Journal Impact Factor identifies the frequency with which an average article from a journal is cited in a particular year. You can use this number to evaluate or compare a journal’s relative importance to others in the same field or see how frequently articles are cited to determine which journals may be better for your publication. Clarivate website.

More on Assessment

JCR: Journal Citation Reports

Using Journal Citation Reports Wisely

"You should not depend solely on citation data in your journal evaluations. Citation data are not meant to replace informed peer review. Careful attention should be paid to the many conditions that can influence citation rates such as language, journal history and format, publication schedule, and subject specialty." Clarivate

In addition to JCR,  the Eigenfactor and h-index metrics are also designed to measure the influence of a journal and author.

Media Coverage