This made possible the CASWJ earning its place among social work journals with an IF. While these blemishes on the face of scholarly publishing are regrettable, we can nevertheless take pride in the hard work of the journal’s editorial board. In effect, our profession has no control over what journals are designated as social work journals within the JCR. There is no public algorithm or set of rules governing this process, which mitigates against a fundamental principle of science, that of transparency. The decision making process used by Clarivate Analytics to choose which journals to include in the list of social work periodicals listed in the JCR is completely opaque. Our current editorial board reflects this international diversity, with members living in Israel, Hong Kong, the Czech Republic, South Africa, and Taiwan being represented. Our recent authors reflect contributions from social work scholars around the world, including countries such as Canada, Portugal, China, Israel, South Africa, and Sweden, among others. We are pleased that the CASWJ is international in scope. Another sign of a journal’s quality is that it has input from social workers around the work. Obviously, journals with greater numbers of downloaded articles are attracting more interest than ones with fewer downloads. In 2019, for example, we had 158,950 article downloads. Another way to evaluate readership are the number of articles downloaded from the journal’s website. As it is, we accepted less than 32% of submissions during the first half of 2020, which is fairly selective. Having more submissions generally means we can be more selective in the papers we accept, elevating the quality of the research we publish. One consequence of obtaining an impact factor like this is that authors seeking a wider readership for their work will be more likely to submit to this journal. Accordingly, IFs for a given journal can rise and fall over time but generally, journal publishers and editors (such as ourselves) like to see their journals’ IF increase over the years. They are recalculated every year and posted in the JCR. Social work journals’ IFs are not static. Were these inappropriately included journals removed from the social work listing, the rank of the CASWJ would be higher still. We are actually better than that since for some reason the JCR incorrectly includes some non-social work journals in its social work list, periodicals such as the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, and the American Journal of Community Psychology. The CASWJ was ranked #24, in terms of 2 year IF, right in the middle of the social work journals listed. Our initial impact factor exceeded that of many other well-established social work journals long-listed in the JCR, including the NASW journal called Social Work Research, the CSWE’s Journal of Social Work Education, and the Clinical Social Work Journal, among others. In this instance, the CASWJ published 111 articles during 20, and these articles were cited in 96 other publications (111/96 = 1.156). We are very pleased to announce that this year the Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal (CASWJ) was added to the JCR, receiving an IF of 1.156. While not all highly cited articles reflect genuinely good research (the work could simply be about something controversial, or contain an egregious mistake that others cite as a bad example, etc.), in general authors like to see their publications cited a lot, hence the attractiveness of publishing in a journal with a high IF. One way to enhance the likelihood your own publications will be read and cited, is to publish in a journal with an IF, and the higher the IF the better, in terms of use within the discipline. The higher a journal’s IF, the more likely it is that its articles will be cited, which is a very direct measure of scholarly impact. A given journal’s impact factor is calculated by counting the number of research papers that journal has published in the past 2 years, and dividing this by the number of times these articles have been cited during that 2 year window. Being listed on the JCR means that a given journal has received an impact factor (IF). Of the several hundred social work journals around the world, only 42 make this list. In the world of scholarly publishing, one way of estimating a journal’s quality,Īmong others, is to see if it is listed in the Web-of-Science’s Journal Citation Reports’ (JCR) database owned by Clarivate Analytics.
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