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Psychology: Writing for Publication

Libguide to resources for psychology

Suggested Reading on Writing and Publishing

The following titles have been approved by the Deputy Course Director of the Oxford Department of Experimental Psychology. All titles are available in the Radcliffe Science Library.

Choosing a Journal for Publication

How to find which journals that publish in your research area? Which ones are highly cited? Are they open access? Do they comply with your funder's requirements? Is it a legitimate journal?

Here are some tools and strategies to help you find journals to publish in.

Scopus and Web of Science are powerful citation databases that have options to sort results by "source title" and "cited by" . You can run a search using keywords describing the content of your research paper, and refine the results to find out the most cited journal titles among the list of results, and journals that publish papers that are heavily cited. Please remember that citations of older papers will obviously tend to be higher than those of recent papers. For more information on research impact, consult the LibGuide on bibliometrics.

Elsevier Journal Finder is a free tool you can use to find an appropriate journal for your paper. Enter the title and abstract of your paper, and the tool returns a list of titles indexed in Web of Science by Elsevier. You can specify your research field and limit results to open access journals before running your search. Results include journal impact factor, acceptance rate, time it takes for the paper to get published, and information relating to open access publishing (embargo period, article fee, user licence).

ThinkCheckSubmit website provides key questions to ask yourself for choosing a trusted journal to publish your research.

Check if an open title title is listed in the The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

SHERPA/FACT helps you find out if the journal you want to publish your research in, complies with your funder's requirements.

Getting Published

Are you looking for resources on how to publish your dissertation or thesis, or the results of your findings? Here are a couple of references to start with: