Scholarly Communications

Worldwide more than 100,000 scholarly journals are published on a regular basis by more than 5,000 academic publishers located in different countries. There are many directories of scholarly journals available in print as well as online format. One of the most authoritative directories is the Ulrich's Periodicals Directory11, produced by ProQuest LLC. The Ulrich's Periodicals Directory (ISSN : 0000-0175) is available in print format, which is an annual publication. Its online edition, known as UlrichsWeb is a searchable database covering about 336,000+ periodicals – providing information about popular and academic magazines, scientific journals, newspapers and other serial publications. It also includes information on open access scholarly journals. On the other hand, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ12) is the online database of open access journals, which is freely accessible and searchable. UlrichsWeb is a subscription-based product, unlike DOAJ. DOAJ lists about 9800+ scholarly open accessjournals published from 124 countries. A few other searchable online databases of scholarly journals include: Genamics13, Academic Journals Database14, Open Access Journals Search Engine15, JURN Directory for the arts & humanities16, British Library’s Zetoc17, RoMEO Journals database18, etc. The RoMEO database also indicates each individual journal’s copyright and self -archiving policies to help the researchers and authors in taking self-archiving decision. Google Scholar Metrics19 provides ranked list of different scholarly journals, ordered by their five-year h-index and h-median metrics. A user can browse the top 100 publications in several languages – presently covering nine source languages viz. English, German, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Chinese and Japanese. For English language journals, users can further browse the top 20 publications in several broad categories and in several subcategories. Google Scholar Metrics presently maintains eight broad categories and about 200+ subcategories. These online and print directories help the researchers and prospective authors in identifying appropriate academic journals as their publishing venues, based on a paper’s research focus, subject coverage and target audience. A research paper should also have relevance matching journal’s aims, scope, and readership. Majority of scholarly journals provide author guidelines online. Author guidelines are also published in journals’ regular issues. Author guidelines should always be consulted before submitting a paper in an academic journal.

2.4.1 Importance of Author Guidelines

Every scholarly journal publishes author guidelines for helping and guiding the authors in submitting their manuscripts. This guidelines help in understanding a journal’s scope, thematic areas, geographical focus, target audiences, and types of papers considered. It also explicitly mentioned the manuscript requirements. These are specific requirements for preparing an abstract, main texts, figures, tables, in-text citations, footnotes or endnotes, and references. A scholarly journal usually follows a specific reference style. In order to get manuscripts accepted, prospective authors should thoroughly follow all the manuscript-related requirements – as clearly specified in the Author Guidelines of a journal. In addition to publicizing the author guidelines, many academic publishers also maintain dedicated online channels for prospective authors. These publishers encourage authors to get registered with them to know publishers’ side announcements, such as call for papers in special issues, call for papers in conferences, call for proposals for research awards, special services for authors’ in developing countries, language enrichment tips, language editing services, etc. These publishers also maintain relevant FAQs (frequently asked questions) pages in their websites for guiding and awareness of prospective authors.