16 PRS Proofreading and Editing Service PhD Experts • All Academic Areas • Fast Turnaround • High Quality PARt I: wHAt to PUBlIsH And wHeRe to PUBlIsH It 2.1.2 Journal Importance, Citation Reports and Impact Factor: Will It Have the Right Effect? Along with range and specialisation, the importance of a journal should be considered as you’re deciding where to submit your work. In all disciplines, word of mouth and experience as a reader is your first guide to the importance or authority of an academic or scientific journal. Every field of study has a few journals that rise above the rest – the sort of journals in which the most significant and innovative work by leading academics or scientists in the field is published. Succeeding at having work published in such a journal can earn scholarly respect, make a professional reputation and go a long way toward establishing a healthy career. These journals are well known to everyone associated with a discipline and widely read, so it is easy enough to identify them and discover the kind of work they publish. It is more difficult, however, to decide whether your work is appropriate for such a journal, if for no other reason than because such a judgement involves accurate self-assessment, so the advice of colleagues and mentors recruited as critical readers will be particularly helpful for this reason as well. If you undervalue your work by not submitting to such journals, you’ll never be published in them, but if you overvalue your work by submitting it when it’s not appropriate, your work will almost certainly be rejected, so again, you need to submit your work to one of these highly respected journals only if it fits the journal’s publishing agenda in both content and significance, not simply because you’d really like to be published in it. Just because any given piece of work isn’t appropriate for such top- tier journals doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be published, however, and it can be much more practical, especially as you’re working to find your authorial voice early in your career, to choose an appropriate, reputable journal for whose pages there isn’t quite as