How Can I Disseminate the Results of My Research?
Advice to authors
Here are some sample titles of books in the Library on writing and getting published.
- Day, R. A. (2006). How to write & publish a scientific paper. (6th ed.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shelved at 808.0665/DAY on the 2nd Floor of the Library
- Lester, J. D. (1996). Writing research papers: a complete guide. (8th ed.) New York: Longman. Shelved at 808.02/LES on the 2nd Floor of the Library
- Lester, J. D. (2006) Writing research papers in the social sciences. New York: Longman. Shelved at 808.0663/LES on the 2nd Floor of the Library
- Luey, B. (2002). Handbook for academic authors. (4th ed.) New York: Cambridge University Press. Shelved at 808.02/LUE in the General Reference Collection on the Ground Floor of the Library. An additional loan copy is shelved at 808.02/LUE on the 2nd Floor of the Library
- Matthews, J. R., J. M. Bowen, et al. (2000). Successful scientific writing. (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shelved at 808.02/MAT on the 2nd Floor of the Library
Instructions to Authors in the Health Sciences links to websites which provide instructions to authors for over 3,000 journals in the health and life sciences.
Impact factors - choosing which journal to publish in
If you are going to publish the results of your research in a journal, you should try and publish them in an important one. One measure of the importance of a journal is the frequency with which papers in that journal have been cited by other authors. This is described as the journal’s impact factor and is a measure of that journal’s importance. You can find out impact factors for many journals by looking at the Journal Citation Reports, which are available online at the Web of Knowledge website. Note that JCR data is always in arrears and the only journals for which impact factors are listed are those journals indexed in the Institute of Scientific Information’s Citation Indexes (Science Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index and the Arts & Humanities Citation Index.). If a journal isn’t listed in any of those indexes then you can’t get an impact factor for it, but if it isn’t listed in those indexes then, almost by definition, it’s not a major journal anyway.
Want to know more about impact factors?
- Wikipedia entry for impact factors
- history and calculation of impact factors
- Online tutorial on the history of impact factors and on their calculation
- A free website eigenFACTOR.org gives access to ranking and impact information.
- Online tutorial on measuring the impact of your research
The media
To explore the possibilities of disseminating your work through the media contact the University Press Office on (023) 9284 3742 (phone) or email news@port.ac.uk.
