Publishing your research

Open Access

Please see our Open Access and Data Management web pages for further information on open access, including information for RCUK and Wellcome Trust funded authors.

New to peer-review?

If you are new to publishing your research or interested in learning more about the system you may be interested in this guide from the Research Information Network: Peer-review: a guide for researchers

There is an ever-increasing need to make your research more visible as it is displayed in search engines which index millions of research outputs.

Your colleagues will be best able to advise you of the relative merit of different publications but it might be worth thinking about the impact your research will make depending on where it is published.

Articles in high-ranking journals may be read and cited by a wider audience than a specialist title. Equallly, an Open Access journal can be read for free by anyone, rather than restricted to those based at subscription-paying institutions.

You may not have to choose between these options as research repositories enable researchers to deposit descriptions of their work and the full-text (where publishers' copyright policies permit) so that you can publish in a subscription-based journal and make your work (often a final peer-reviewed manuscript which the publisher has accepted for publication but not yet copy-edited) openly available to the wider research community.

Citations

The number of citations an article recieves is an indication of its impact based on popularity. This does not mean that it is of high quality. Indeed, an article may be widely cited as an example of bad practice. However, citations are an area of increasing interest to individual authors and institutions. Citations can give an indication of seminal articles and there are tools available which enable you to track academic debate based on who has cited a given work.

It should be noted that there are wildly varying traditions of citiation in different disciplines and therefore what is highly cited in one field may only represent an average citation count in another.

Databases, most notably Web of Science, Google Scholar and some publisher websites enable you to monitor citations in a number of ways:

• counting citations - find out how many others have cited a given work
• cited reference search - find out which articles have cited a previously published work
• citation alerts - find out when a newly published article cites a previously published  work
• citation reports - for a variety of statistics relating to an author
• citation maps -find related material and shared citations

Journal impact

In addition to getting a citation report on an author it is also possible to run a journal citation report.These are delivered via Web of Knowledge for Science and Social Science journals. They give an indication of quality but should always be considered in conjunction with advice from peers. Again, comparisons cannot be made across disciplines.

 Impact factors are proabably the best known aspect of these reports. An impact factor represents the average number of citations in a year given to those papers in a journal that were published during the two preceding years. It is therefore a reflection of the current popularity a journal. 

Alternative ways of measuring journal impact include the Eigenfactor and the data produced by SCImago (which utilises data from the Scopus database, rather than Web of Science).

Choosing journals

Many journals do allow the deposit the post-print (the peer-reviewed version of the authors article, prior to publishing and without any formatting that would be reflected in the style of the journal it is published) in our institutional repository, or a subject repository such as arXiv or UK PubMed Central. Many publishers also run open access journals, or allow articles to be published open access within a subscription journal for a fee.

If you would like to deposit an article in to Durham Research Online, you can do so via the staff profile system and library staff will check the publisher's repository policy before depositing the full text of the publication. For further information, please see the information for depositors on Durham Research Online.

You can also check for yourself prior to choosing where to publish, using the Sherpa Romeo database (to check publisher copyright and self-archiving policies) or the Sherpa Juliet database to find a summary of policies given by various research funders as part of their grant awards.