FAQ
1.How can you participate?
Answer:
Simple. All you have to do is register so that you will be able to access the other services available. At this time, participation is limited to providing suggestions and comments at the site's forum. We are working on developing some surveys related to journal ranking.
2.Who needs ranking data?
Answer:
There are differing views on the need for journal ranking and what it does for/to researchers. The following articles are linked here for the interested audience:
- "The Number that is Devouring Science" by Richard MonasterskyK
- "The Need for Accurate Journal Ranking" by Brenda Karli (in preparation)
3.Why is the website slow?
Answer:
The site has been heavily accessed since the launch. This (we were informed by Australian, British, as well as American colleagues) is a result of the respective educational authorities conducting their annual assessments on research output. Please bear with us as we work towards improving the situation.
4.Why does the site only rank journals listed in the ISI's SCI?
Answer:
As we are a new service, we used the journals indexed by SCI since they already have 7,300 plus journals listed there. This allows us a base to work from and although 7,300 plus journals sounds pretty exhaustive, we know with great certainty that many other quality journals are not listed with SCI due to variable reasons. We are more than happy to enroll journals not listed with the SCI and appeal to the audience to provide recommendations to us as there are far too many domains in the academia.
5.What if a journal in your domain is not in our listing? How can journals not in our listing participate?
Answer:
If a journal in your domain is not found in our listing, you could recommend the journal to us. However, this alone is not sufficient for us to include a journal. We would require the assistance of the domain expert (who made that recommendation) to approach the particular journal's editor-in-chief to determine if the journal would like to be enrolled in our ranking system. The journal in question is then required to provide all citation data, such as the titles of all papers published, the authors, their affiliations, and the references made in all the papers. This is the crucial data we require as input into our system.
6.Why we do not rank conferences, symposiums and the like?
Answer:
Journals and conferences/symposiums are of very different dynamics. Journals tend to take a longer time to accept submitted papers, allowing authors the opportunity to clarify their work and subsequent revision of their papers. This process can be an extended (compared with conferences and symposiums) period of time between submission and acceptance.
Conferences and symposiums on the other hand, have very short lead times between paper submissions and acceptances, curtailing the revision of papers. The referees are also pressed for time and usually cannot ask for clarifications and accept or reject a paper at face value.
Perhaps conferences symposiums should be ranked as separate entities.
7.How to become a sponsor?
Answer:
If you are among those interested in sponsoring our ranking activities, there are three main ways to do so:
- Sponsoring hardware resources
- Sponsoring software resources
- Sponsoring financial resources
Interested parties can send an email to ranking@redjasper.com.