Wanting to make progress in your academic career? An important step is to consider which journals you are publishing in. It’s fine to publish in both what is considered to be top-tier journals and lower tiered journals, ensuring of course that they are not predatory. Search Cabell’s site so as to stay clear of predatory journals.
I have found that creating a list of journals in your discipline is a good start. The list may include the names of journals in which you or your colleagues and key players in your field have published work. They may also be journals for which you are a reviewer or associate editor. If you’re stumped and can’t think of any journals, consider asking a few colleagues in your discipline to recommend a few names of journals. This should assist with creating a list of at least 5-10 journals. Of course, the list can be refined overtime to include additional journals or to remove journals.
Once you have that list, it’s great to identify which journals are tier 1 and tier 2 journals. Amy Guptill’s ‘Four Tiers of Sources and How to Tell the Difference’ is quite helpful in this regard. If you are considering a promotion, you want to have some of your work published in these journals because this suggests that your scholarly output is of a high quality, which promotion committees look for. To identify journals in my discipline that are tier 1 and 2 journals, I did a simple Google search, which I think was the quickest way to get this information. I typed in ‘tier 1 journals in educational leadership and management’, which produced some decent results. I first looked at the results of Google’s AI overview, which generated a short but useful list. Google Scholar’s top publications list was exceptionally useful. I was not only able to identify if any from my list of journals were tier 1, but I got the names of a few more journals, which I had not considered adding to my list.
Surprisingly, I also found an article, entitled “Where Should Educational Leadership Authors Publish to Get Noticed by the Top Journals in the Discipline?” written by Jayson W. Richardson and Scott McLeod. This find confirmed for me that there were others who thought this exercise important enough to publish so that others like me, and you, can be guided. The article also served as a verification that I had identified the top journals in my discipline, although there were a few that I had that were missing from the authors’ list. Nonetheless, to you early career researchers in the field of educational leadership and management, I recommend reading the article and to everyone within the discipline and in other disciplines, I hope that you find this post helpful for generating your own list so that you can target those high tiered publication outlets and get that promotion!
