ENG 592 Graduate Proseminar II

As burgeoning scholars in your field, you will need to become experts in the scholarship that you will use in your writing and teaching. One way to keep abreast of new research is to identify the top journals in your field. Your advisor or other faculty in your department might tell you the best journals to follow; you might discover the best journals yourself. You can also use the tools below to determine how popular and impactful journals in your field are.

When you are searching for articles for your research, it is very likely you will start to notice that some of the scholarship you are finding is published in the same few journals. This is a clue that these journals can be the top journals in your field. This can also be a clue that one of these journals might be a special issue dedicated to your area of study.

Oxford Bibliographies (NYPL): Select Subject, then narrower topic. On the left you’ll see Journals.

Google Scholar: Click on the three bars in the upper left --> Metrics --> Click VIEW ALL (under Top Publications) --> Select CATEGORIES --> Humanities, Literature & Arts --> Select SUBCATEGORIES --> Your Field

MLA Directory of Periodicals: Start at MLA --> Click on database title to change database --> change to Directory of Periodicals

Web of Science: Search in: Web of Science Core Collection; Editions: Change from All to Arts & Humanities Citation Index

In DOCUMENTS search, you can search by Topic, Title, Author, etc. Each result will display how many other articles cited this article (if any), how many references this article uses, and the Journal Citation Indicator for the journal in which the article is published.

A CITED REFERENCES search allows users to search for CITED AUTHOR and/or CITED WORK (among other options). A CITED AUTHOR search, for example, returns articles published by the author, and a link to all of the other articles that cite the author’s work.

Google: Even librarians might start with a very basic Google search, such as "best journals in Gothic literature." If this is where you start, too, be sure to include the word libguide. Therefore, the search is: "best journals in Gothic literature libguide"

Why? Libguides are guides like this one: curated by librarians and archivists to contain the best resources for researchers.

Adding "libguide" to your search will hopefully weed out a lot of other lists that are not academic (I.e., this search should omit personal lists on websites or blogs, and any other sites that might not be affiliated in any way with research or higher education institutions, or libraries). 

Journal Impact Factors and h-Indexes are tools to determine the importance of a journal in its field, and to the scholars and researchers who read its content. Use these resources if you're looking for this particular information to evaluate a journal you are considering using.

Journal Impact Factor: "[A] measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year. It is used to measure the importance or rank of a journal by calculating the times its articles are cited."

h-index: The h-index is a simple way to measure the impact of your work and other people's research. It does this by looking at the number of highly impactful publications a researcher has published. The higher the number of cited publications, the higher the h-index, regardless of which journal the work was published in.

Journal Citation Reports: Browse by journal or subject area to find relevant, reputable journals

Homepage --> Databases: Journal Citation Reports --> Categories --> Literature, American

Google Scholar: Same instructions as above. Once you identify the journals in your field, you can click on the number under the h5-index column to see the top-cited articles from each journal: the article's citation and a link to the full text (if available), the number of times the article has been cited, and a link to all of the articles that cite the one you are looking at. 

Once you know the journals best suited for your research, you can set up alerts for new scholarship. Now you do not have to remember to conduct searches every month to find newly published research.

Search for the journal on the Library's homepage under Journal Search. Click on the link to access the journal electronically, then look for the Alert feature. Follow the instructions to set up an alert. Make sure to check your spam folder to ensure journal alert emails are not ending up there.