Activity: Identifying Top Journals & Scholars

Overview

Identifying top journals and scholars in your area of study is a foundational step in understanding the conversations happening, and how you can step in. These journals may later be those that you’ll want to publish in.

 

Activity: Find Top Journals

There are a number of ways to discover what journals are important in your area of research interest. Try some of these strategies.

• Talk to faculty members and librarians in your field. Most will recommend journals of importance.
• Use Scimago or Google Scholar Metrics, sites that provide ranked lists of journals in broad disciplinary fields.
  • Examples: classics journals and special education journals
• Identify journals published by key organizations in your discipline. (Faculty members and librarians can recommend organizations.)
  • Example: the Association for Computational Linguistics publishes the journal Computational Linguistics
• Search for articles related to your research interest (in UW Libraries Search, Google Scholar or a research database) to discover which journals consistently publish on the topic.
  Use the Research Guide related to your subject to identify relevant databases. Each guide links to the major databases and resources for that field. Find your subject on the Research Guide list (there are additional subject lists for UW Bothell, UW Tacoma, and Health Sciences).
  • Example: I am interested in Indigenous peoples in the United States during the colonial period. I browse the Research Guide list and see that there is a Native American history research guide. The guide recommends a database called America History & Life. I search the database for my keywords and discover many articles are published in the journal Early American Studies.

Once you identify a journal, use Journal Search to see if the UW Libraries has an online subscription. Browse issues and be sure to save PDFs of interesting articles.

As you begin reading articles related to your subject area you will begin to notice that many of the same authors show up in the literature review section and article footnotes — you’ve just identified some of the top scholars in the field.

Bonus Tip

• Many journals have an option to set an automatic alert (you may have to set up an account on the publisher’s website) so that you are emailed the table of contents when a new issue is published.