What Does It Take to have a High-quality Journal?

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Did you ever wonder what qualities make a high-quality journal? As editor, I think of it often. Alfred N. Brandon began the ‘‘selected book and journal list’’ in 1965. He considered the usefulness of core holdings lists that were sporadically published between 1940 and 1959 by the American Medical Association. Small medical libraries used the list as a guide to quality print books and journals. Dorothy Hill became involved with the list in the 1970s when it became known as the Brandon-Hilllist.In2003,thelistwasoutsourcedtoDoody’s and is no longer openly accessible. Doody’s Core Titles in Health Sciences offers online overviews and analyses of major titles (http://www.doody.com/dct/). There is not one single indicator that is used to determine the quality of a journal. Rather certain journal characteristics are considered. Lee, Schotland, Bacchetti, and Bero (2002) chose to investigate what characteristics are found in clinical research journals. Their aim was to help clinicians, scientists, and health policy analysts to select the most up-to-date literature. They felt that predictors of methodological quality were as follows: peer review status, citation rate, impact factor, circulation, manuscript acceptance rate, indexed in Medline, and indexed in the Brandon-Hill Library List. After reviewing243 articles for these quality indicators they found that high citation rates, impact factors, circulation rates, and low manuscript acceptance ratingsappear tobepredictiveofhigher methodological quality journals. They found significant associations between quality scores and higher citation rates (p < .001), higher impact factors (p < .001), impact factor range (.22-28.66), higher circulation range (1,080-3.7. million), and lower manuscript acceptance rates ranging between 7.5%-72%. Open-access journal quality indicators are similar (http://library.ryerson.ca/services/faculty/scholarlycommunication/evaluating-open-access-journals/). Journals are considered of better quality when their scope is well defined and clearly stated, the audience is primarily practitioners and researchers, the editorial board is made up of peoplerecognized as experts,it is affiliated with an established scholarly society, articles have a digital object identifier, and it is included in subject data bases. In summary, articles of higher methodological quality are found in journals in which articles are cited more frequently, have higher impact factors, are read more widely, and are carefully scrutinized by editors and peer reviewers. These factors may be predictive of journal quality. Journal citation and manuscript acceptance rates were the best predictors of the quality of research articles (Lee, Schotland, Bacchetti, & Bero, 2002). The indicators for open-access journals are similar.