Publication Quality, Evaluating Publishers, and Bibliometrics

This guide is designed to help faculty understand how to better understand how to evaluate scholarship and choose the right publisher.

Caveat: Information related to bibliometrics and other quantitative analysis of scholarship is detailed in depth but this information may not be relevant to your discipline or professional area. We suggest you locate guidelines for excellence in scholarship via your scholarly society or professional organization. We also suggest you consult Boyer's categories for scholarship listed below under Publication Quality.

Some of this content is based on or taken from a similar guide created by the librarians at John Jay College of Criminal Justice Lloyd Sealy Library and modified for the City Tech faculty community. 

Publication quality is a way of thinking about evaluation of scholarship that is holistic and that considers different types of scholarship. Ernest Boyer's 1990 Scholarship Reconsidered continues to be a meaningful resource for generating thought.

Wendi Arant Kaspar summarizes how Boyer categorizes scholarship:

• Scholarship of discovery is original research and what is often considered the traditional model which takes the form of scholarly books, journal articles, reference works.  
• Scholarship of integration involves synthesis of information across disciplines, across topics within a discipline or identifies trends over time. Interdisciplinary research projects or scholarly conferences are such examples.  
• Scholarship of application or engagement is the application of knowledge to solve real world problems. The "Grand Challenges" that the US President charged higher education to address is symbolic of this type of research. This may take the form of collaboration with community, industry or service organizations, development of policy or educational outreach or services or the contribution of processes or products to improve the world. 
• Scholarship of teaching and learning looks at the scholarship and transmission of knowledge around pedagogy and learning within a discipline or more broadly. This may be formally published materials, innovative teaching materials or the use of emerging technology for instruction. 

from Kaspar, Wendi Arant. "What’s so Important about Peer Review?" College & Research Libraries 77.6 (2016): p. 680.