17 PRS Proofreading and Editing Service PhD Experts • All Academic Areas • Fast Turnaround • High Quality PARt I: wHAt to PUBlIsH And wHeRe to PUBlIsH It much competition. It’s always best to choose a refereed or peer- reviewed journal because this means that the research articles published by that journal have been evaluated by scholars and researchers who specialise in the subject area. This process tends to eliminate articles with flaws in content, and journals that use it tend to earn academic and scientific respect and influence. Ulrich’s Periodical Directory, online access to which can be gained through most university libraries, can be used to determine if a journal is peer- reviewed, and Journal Citation Reports, also available through most university libraries, provides a way of evaluating the research influence and impact of more than 10,000 science and social sciences journals. In the second of these publications, citations of research articles are recorded and the number of times the articles published by each journal have been cited over the course of a year is determined to construct an inclusive journal citation network. Citations of the articles published by a journal are averaged to provide an impact factor for the journal over either a two-year or five- year period, as well as an immediacy index, which indicates the number of times articles published by the journal in a given year have been cited in that same year. Citation reports and impact factors can be extremely helpful when choosing an influential and respected journal that will effectively make your work accessible to a large number of the readers for whom you’re writing, but they should be used with caution. Citation rates in the first years after publication vary from discipline to discipline and even within a discipline one article can be cited a hundred times more often than the next article, thereby greatly improving the impact factor of a journal that nonetheless tends to publish articles that are rarely cited. There are also a number of ways in which journals can deliberately skew the citation data: by including, for instance, a smaller number of articles that are unlikely to be cited,