Journal Finder plays an important role in a Library's research lifecycle toolkit, providing a key service for academics to identify journals within their field as per the Australian Research Council's disciplinary matrix and the Australian Research Council's associated journal list of eligible publications. Journal Finder assists academics who are seeking to publish an article to ensure that their targeted journal is scholarly, publishes original peer reviewed research, has an ISSN and is active in their field. Journal Finder supplements this list of nearly 20,000 journals with additional refined indicators for making assessments about journal quality within a specific discipline. Journal Finder answers four key questions that every academic faces when they have recently completed an article:
- "Where to publish";
- "Is the journal in my field";
- "Is it a quality publication" and;
- "Does it count"?
As disseminating research findings is a key aspect of the research process, Journal Finder plays a direct role in helping academics find appropriate journals and an indirect role in lifting Western Sydney University rankings. This latter outcome is achieved through Journal Finder providing contextual data around quality and ensuring research outputs meet government guidelines. It therefore squarely targets the strategic goal of a "vibrant research-led university with regional, national and global impact" through assisting the alignment of research outcomes and impact with Western Sydney University research themes via an interface that organises all outlets in Australian cluster, discipline and field contexts.
In 2014, it was nominated for a VC ‘Excellence in Professional Service’ award under the Team Leader category (Jason Ensor [Team Leader, with Susan Robbins and Michael Gonzalez). For the Library, it was also recognised in the VC's 2014 Annual Report as an essential tool which automates the process of sourcing, normalising and presenting journal performance information, leading to efficiencies both within the Library and across the University’s research units.
When Journal Finder was originally built nearly 5 years ago, it was configured primarily for use on desktop computers and tablets, and therefore its viewport was designed for landscape-format screens only. It was not therefore smartphone friendly, which predominantly favour portrait-based viewports. In 2014, only 8% of digital access to the Library website was by a mobile-phone device; however in 2017 this increased to 20% of users (source: Google Analytics); by contrast, tablet access has remained consistent at 7% between 2014 and 2018. Therefore, this 'Does It Count' port redesigns and integrates a mobile specific interface. This smartphone edition’ of Journal Finder will address this ongoing shift in access, allowing for Journal Finder to be easily accessed and used via personal handheld computing devices, and will future-proof it for integration into the proposed whole-of-Library website redesign and current website trends favouring mobile first adaptive and responsive design, thumb-reachable navigation, modular page creation, and progressive web app functionality. It will be Journal Finder’s first major addition in nearly 5 years.
This repository contains all the files and plugins necessary to run the smartphone edition of Journal Finder. However, due to licensing arrangements around Library-subscribed publications and metrics data, the database has not been made available. The data must be added and configured on a per institution basis.
The core files of the Journal Finder (Smartphone Edition) project are open source. This continues commitments announced during a presentation by Jason Ensor and Michael Gonzalez at the Australian National University and CAUL 'Reinventing University Publishing' conference ("It's Time to Pull Out the Stopper: Rethinking Impact in Post-Print Scholarship", 17-19 March 2015, Canberra, Australia), and during Susan's Robbins and Jason Ensor's presentation at VALA 2016 ("Strategic Publishing Using Journal Finder", https://www.vala.org.au/vala2016-proceedings/vala2016-session-9-robbins/). For further details, please email [email protected].
