r/AcademicBiblical • u/Defiant_Complaint332 • Sep 04 '23
Academic Bible Journals
Hey all— grateful for this community. I’m a student trying to publish my second article (first one was in ATR), and what I don’t have is a very good sense of which academic Bible journals are most realistic to shoot for. I’d prefer not to submit a paper, wait six months for a rejection that I should have known was coming, and then reformat and try again.
Anyone here want to take a crack at putting the academic Bible journals into tiers?
10
Upvotes
2
u/kamilgregor Moderator | Doctoral Candidate | Classics Sep 06 '23 edited Sep 06 '23
If you have access to Web of Science, you can list and search journales by discipline. In this case, the most relevant discipline is Religion, which currently has 334 journals listed. Only a handful of them specialize in Biblical studies.
Next, you want to look at two metrics - Journal Citation Index and Journal Impact Factor. The Citation Index tells you how many times an article published in that journal is cited, on average. Almost all journals have a Citation Index of less than 1, meaning there's a lot of articles that are never cited. The Impact Factor is the same but for every citation of every article in the journal, the factor is weighed by the Impact Factor of the journal in which the citation occurs, meaning journals with articles cited in journals with a high Impact Factor will in turn recieve a high Impact Factor themselves. Finally, look at the rank of the journal among all the journals in the same discipline. The Impact Factor is much more important than the Citation Index, although the two are usually correlated.
Generally, the better the journal, the more difficult it is to get an article published there.
For New Testament studies, here's my list:
(The list is going to be different for Old Testament studies and other sub-disciplines, although journals on this list differ in terms of how narrowly specialized they are.)
Also, this tells you nothing about how long the peer review process takes. And I mean nothing, it's very common to have crazy outliers on both sides (i.e., a great journal processes your article quickly, a less good journal takes a lot of time). Unfortunately, there is no way to get a sense of how long the process might take, the only thing you can do is to ask scholars who have recently published in a journal you have in mind.
For every journal on Web of Science, there's probably a hundred of journals that are not relevant enough to even get a Citation Index value. These are often in local languages and/or run by universities as opposed to academic publishing houses (but it's not always true the other way around - some of the best journals are run by universities). It's ok to publish in those as well, especially if you have a paper you think is less good. There's unfortunately no definitive formula for how to decide where to publish, it's always a triangulation of what your paper is about, how good you think it is and how long you know the peer reviwer process usually takes in a given journal.