You should to aim to publish in highly regarded journals. Article citations may not be immediately available for all Early Career Researchers or others researching in the Arts for example, so being published in highly regarded journals can be a good indicator of research impact or esteem.

Highly regarded journals can be evaluated according to either journal ranks or journal metrics.

Not all funding bodies accept journal metrics.

See: 

• NHRMC: Publication assessment in track record
• The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) 

For more information see our Where to Publish Guide

Example statement:

My 2021 article published in the Psychological Bulletin has been cited 11 times. The journal is in the top-quartile (Q1) for the area of General Psychology and is ranked 2/203 of journals according to SciMago Journal Rankings." (Source: SciMago, 1 June 2021)

SCImago Journal Rank

SJR is based on metrics or data from Scopus. The ranks are based on field-normalised journal metrics.  The ranks are expressed as quartiles from Q1 to Q4 and each is an indicator of a journals rank within other journals in the same field of research. The top quartile, Q1 indicates that the journals in that quartile are in the top 75-100% of journals in their field, Q2 journals would be in the 50-75% , finally Q4 journals are in the low 25% of journals in their field.

Your research quality can be demonstrated by your research outputs being published in top ranked journals. There are several journal rankings lists - each uses different methods for determining the rankings, none are comprehensive and vary according to discipline.

• Ranked Journal lists by discipline. This guide can be used to find other ranked journal titles by discipline.

Example Statement:

"In  2020 16.7% of my published articles were published in journals that were in the top 10% of most cited journals world wide. 31.8% of my published articles were in top 10% ranked journals according to the SciVal Performance Indicators" (Source: SciVal, 11 November 2021).

Find evidence of your publication Performance Indicators in SciVal:

You can show evidence of your publication performance in your SciVal Overview

• Select Overview in SciVal
• Select Researchers and Groups
• Find your name in the list, or Define a New Researcher to add yourself to the list.
• Select your name
• Select Summary
• Scroll to Performance Indicators
• You can change the metric by which the percentile is defined, for example from CiteScore Percentile to SciMago Journal Ranking (SJR)

Scopus Journal Metrics

The SNIP (Source-Normalized Impact per Paper). This metric is based on journal citations relative to citations for other journals in a specified field of research. This metric is shown in Scopus source details of journal titles.

Scopus will also express the Journal Rank as a Percentile, which can also be expressed as a Quartile. In this case the journal would be ranked as Q1

Web of Science Journal Metrics

Web of Science uses Journal Quartiles and takes Data from Journal Citation Reports