Tips for publishing

ORCID ("Open Researcher and Contributor ID") is a distinct and alphanumerical identifier for scientific authors. It allows matching a person and a paper flawlessly: spelling variants, name changes and people with the same name do not matter anymore.

The non-profit organisation "Open Researcher Contributor Identification Initiative" wants to make the 16-digit ORCID the de-facto standard of author identification in scientific publishing. And there are already numerous publishers that require stating your ORCID when submitting your paper, e. g. Wiley and IEEE.

You can get your ORCID free and online (opens new window) (opens in a new window), and you can create a author profile with all publications up to now.

There are several rankings, in which the impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) is calculated.

The impact factor indicates how often articles in a given journal are being cited, and thus tries to show its relevancy. There is a lot of criticism, but you should still try to find out about the impact factors of the journals in your field.

Researchers usually categorize journals as A+, A, B, C, etc., whereby articles from an A journal are considered to be of very high quality in the scientific community. Here are some example rankings:

If a journal is not yet part of a ranking, you can assess its quality by using the criteria of the Journal Evaluation Tool (opens in a new window).

When you have identified a few interesting journals, you should look at full texts. By doing this you will find out about the exact scope of the journal and about the required scientific level. Electronic full texts of journals at HNU are available in the Electronic Journals Library (EZB) (opens new window) (opens in a new window).

Many journals publish open access, i. e. their publications are freely available. You can find out more on this topic on our open access subpage.

There will always be author guidelines on the website. They will tell you about content (scope, methods), layout (formatting, sending format) and assessment procedure of the article you are trying to submit.

Peer-reviewed journals will always look for reviewers.

• What do I need to do as a reviewer?
  You need to check whether the submitted article fits the scope of your journal, whether the research question is stated clearly and an appropriate method has been chosen to answer it properly. Additionally, you need to assess whether the findings are reproducible, original and new. 
• What are the benefits?
  You will not receive any payment because peer review is part of the self-regulation of the scientific community. But some publishers will grant free access to their publishing archive.

There are rankings for journals, but there is no ranking for book publishers.

Please read the author guidelines in the website and make sure that the publisher is a scientific publisher: a publisher should always check and correct your manuscript before publishing it.

Beware of:

• book-on-demand publishers, which will publish anything without correcting it
• vanity publishers that require a fee for publishing your manuscript.

When in doubt, look for testimonials online.