Urban Studies - Research Guide: Professionalization (draft)

SAGE's online learning platform for research skills and methods, using structured online learning. Includes workbooks, videos, and quizzes. Requires free personal registration.

The newspaper of higher education frequently runs articles and advice columns on getting published. Some recent examples include:
• "21 dos and don'ts for journal writers and reviewers" / Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan and Wendy Troop-Gordon. (4/23/2019)
• "The high anxiety of submitting a book proposal" / Laura Portwood-Stacer. (1/24/2022)
• "Crafting a convincing book proposal" / Manya Whitaker. (3/6/2018)
• "6 types of book proposals that don't get contracts" / Laura Portwood-Stacer. (7/19/2021)
• "The art of (successfully) appealing a manuscript rejection" / Anahí Viladrich. (5/3/2021)

A beginner-level 1.5-hour interactive SAGE Campus course that covers where to start when choosing a journal, types of publication, and how to narrow down your choice.

Cabells International is a longtime aggregator of journal publishing information for authors in search of a journal outlet.
• Journalytics provides metrics (including acceptance rates) and editor contacts for 13,000+ journals in 15 subject areas.
HINT! Use the Journalytics search filter to find your discipline and subdiscipline, or search for a journal title to discover its assigned disciplines and subdisciplines.
• Predatory Reports identifies ~16,000 journals that meet Cabells' behavioral indicators for exploitative operations. The database provides a summary of Cabells' violations reports for listed titles.
• Cabells also provides author services - English language editing, manuscript formatting, and journal selection - for a fee. The Penn Libraries do not subscribe to these author services.

JCR has been the longtime go-to database for journal impact ranking. Impact indicators include Journal Impact Factor (an index of citations received by a journal's articles published within the preceding two years or five years), Immediacy Index (an index of citations received by a journal's articles published during their publication year), Eigenfactor (5-year JIF weighted by JIF score of citing journals), and Cited/Citing Half-Life (the longevity of citations to a journal's articles). JCR is published alongside Web of Science.

Uses the Web of Science databases and Journal Citation Reports journal list to suggest journals that relate to your article's title and abstract. Useful for searching among many subjects and among journals from many publishers.

One example of a publisher's journal recommendation tool, from a leading publisher in social sciences and behavioral sciences.

The standard reference for identifying journals (and where they're indexed).

Penn Libraries Catalog advanced search for subject headings:
(sociology OR "urban studies" OR "city planning" OR "social work" OR criminology OR "criminal justice" OR "political science" OR "international relations" OR education OR psychology OR linguistics) AND periodicals AND directories

Penn Libraries guide, Scholarly Communications.
SHERPA RoMEO is a database compiling the open access policies of publishers and their journals worldwide. Use it to see if a publisher permits redistribution of your article through your own website, ScholarlyCommons (Penn's institutional repository), or a third-party open-access repository like SSRN or SocArxiv.