I’m currently writing up my first batch of research and, to give myself a bit of a kick in the pants to do that, I thought I’d make a plan for journals to submit to.
The Elusive Impact Factor
Anyone who’s tried to start mapping out journals in a new field knows it’s a pretty onerous task, and one that can prove really difficult without the right access. The go-to rating is “impact factor”, a number curated by Thomson Reuters, but, annoyingly, it’s quite hard to get hold of a ranked impact factor list. The book that contains this elusive information costs a small fortune and is held, pretty much, by academic libraries only. And not all academic libraries by any means…
Sometimes, you can find the impact factor listed on a journals’ home page, but, of course, that depends on knowing of the journal in the first place. When you’re starting out and just want a nicely ranked list of journals in your area, generally you’ve no option but to try and track down a hard copy of the TR book.
An Alternative: SCImago Journal Rank
Anyway, it was with much relief that I came across a post by Ben Betts of HT2 who had gone through the same process a couple of years before me. He has curated a list of the 50 top Education and Learning Technology based Journals, all rated by a different system, of which I hadn’t come across before. This system is called the SJR indicator (González-Pereira et al, 2010) and is, from a quick look, based on a similar system to Google Pagerank. That’s pretty interesting to me given the digital marketing side of my work, and seems like a very sensible idea, given how well Pagerank works. Or, how well it used to work, before it became the most gamed system on the planet…
Still, even with all of the gaming, the weight given to more prestigious and trusted websites tends to help quality rise to the top. On the downside, it does make it very hard for new and aspiring content creators to rise in the rankings, but it is more than possible.
Anyway, I haven’t looked in enough detail at the ranking system to evaluate it, only enough to verify that it looks credible, and that it seems to correlate reasonably well with data I managed to find on impact factor. SJR and Impact Factor ranking matches more closely on higher rated journals than lower, but it seems a decent measure nonetheless.
A Ranked List of Technology Enhanced Learning Journals
So, to my purpose here – Ben listed a large number of general education journals in his post, but I wanted to collate a list of Educational Technology specific journals here, and provide links to them all for easy submission and checking of special issues, etc. I also wanted to collate their impact factor, if easily available, and their corresponding SJR.
Hopefully this helps others out as much as Ben’s original post helped me in creating this list. No doubt I’ve missed some great publication options here – please let me know in the comments if you know of any I should add!
González-Pereira, B., Guerrero-Bote, V.P. & Moya-Anegón, F., 2010. A new approach to the metric of journals’ scientific prestige: The SJR indicator.Journal of Informetrics, 4(3), p.379-391.
