“School of Authors” is a website from Comunicar, Scientific Journal in Education and Communication, indexed in main international data bases, that complements other websites in Spanish, English and Portuguese. “School of Authors” is written and edited, basically, by the Editorial Board of “Comunicar” and it aims to offer different sources, for manuscript submissions in scientific journals in a planned and strategic manner. It is intended to make authors think about scientific information management for publishing scientific manuscripts in high impact journals.

Impact factor, a scientific indicator to measure scientific journals

The Impact Factor is a Bibliometric Indicator devised by Eugene Garfield in 1955 (Garfield, 1955) in order to assess quantitatively and annually the contribution as a set that makes a magazine to the science. To do this, the magazine takes into account citations received by the set of articles, understanding that cites are a direct proof of the scientific contribution of the works.

The Impact Factor is calculated with an easy and intuitive formula; to calculate the Impact Factor of a journal in a given year (e.g. 2017), it is counted the number of cites that the magazine receives in 2017 for the articles published in its two previous years and are relativized among the number of papers that have been published in those two years.

The thorny issue of self-citing

Citing article from the literature to support a research report to be published in a journal is a necessary practice. The inclusion of pertinent, correct and precise cites allows the author to locate the work that is presented in the state of the art of knowledge in the theme of the article. Within this necessary cites there are found the self cites that are those cites that the author or authors make to their own works.

Regarding this issue, there are various positions; in the extremes there are some people who think that it is quite unseemly to cite the person by itself, claiming that this is an infamous self-promotion of their works. At the other side are those who believe that they should not mention to others rather than themselves, arguing that their jobs are the most important of the area, and within these extremes there emerge several intermediate positions. It is true that the cite of a work is a recognition of scientific value (negative sometimes, but valid too) of a published work, which forms the basis of the new that is presented, then for that reason the self citing is equivalent to self-recognizing the value of our work that others should do.

OJS

The increasing necessity for spreading the scientific knowledge has motivated the development of platforms of publishing management, including OJS, DpubS, OpenConf, Digital Commons, Scholastica, ScholarOne, among others, automating a significant amount of processes as sending of manuscripts, establishment of scope and periodicity, coordination of communications, presentation of announcements, implementation of delivery dates and tracking of manuscripts through peer revision. All this, accompanied by a representative saving of resources and time for editors, authors and readers.

OJS is the software of open code for excellence for the management of scientific journals. Currently, around 8.286 use it, with approximately 3.200.000 published elements, among book chapters, reviews and scientific articles. The advantages that it has towards the other managers are:

Open Access

Open Acess is the access without economic, technical or administrative restrictions, or those derived from copyright to digital resources that come from the academic and scientific production. This way, user can access free of charge through the network to the scientific publications, being able to reproduce and distribute information provided that they contemplate author rights, recovered, normally through Creative Common licenses.

The start of this movement is motivated for the technical advances and the development of the Internet, which facilitates the management, storage and global distribution of scientific content.

H, H5, G, i, i5

This is not a letter soup! They are the acronyms of some of the best known scientific production indexes. Both researchers and journals are ranked by their level of productivity and impact in the scientific community, usually measured by citations that are generated in other publications.

In recent years, the H index, proposed by Jorge Hirsch of the University of California in 2005, has been very strong. Its popularity has been due to Google (as well as other large databases such as Scopus, WoS). Integrated in its star product for the University: Google Scholar.

International presence

That scientific knowledge has no boundaries is an undeniable fact and that scientific journals have contributed to spread science and make it reach all or almost all corners of the world as well. However, every researcher must master a series of strategies to ensure that their work has international impact and recognition.

The School of Authors, in previous entries has already provided some keys that guarantee the success of a publication, but it is necessary that the researcher, novel or not, take into account a series of actions, as a decalogue, to ensure the international presence:

Main types of limitations

In a recent post I commented on the importance of expressing the limitations of the study and from the feedback received by colleagues, researchers and readers of the blog School of Authors of Communicate, I was asked to go deeper into the subject and to try the possible types of limitations. I will try to address this request, but I want to start by commenting that each study is different, so limitations, although generalities can be determined, may have particularities that are not associated with any variant or category that I will comment on.