How to Boost Your Journal's Citation Count

Building a strong reputation and maximizing your journal’s impact factor (IF) can considerably help your journal in the long run - by increasing your citation count you’ll secure an honorable place in the academic community and will more likely be regarded as a worthwhile investment for academic funding institutions.

Besides being an important factor that helps journals establish their names in the academic community, citations also help authors get their deserved credit and accommodate the audiences in need of valuable information and significant findings presented by the researchers.

Citations and Journal Impact Factor

The role of citations in the academic sphere is vast as they serve several purposes: credit the authors of the cited works, direct the readers to other related works for further research, and finally, contribute to the journal's impact factor.

Journal's Impact Factor is a measure that shows the average frequency of citations in a journal within the last two years. Although this method of estimating a journal's importance has been increasingly criticized in the last years, it still remains an important metric that urges the publishers to build their journals' citation count.

Digitization of rare articles

Publishers and journal hosting platform developers are continuously analyzing the ever-changing readers' habits and adapting to their findings in a way that's most beneficial to the academic community. One of such findings relates to the increasing readers’ attention to digitized older publications presented online.

Studies show* that non-elite open-access journals featuring digitized versions of older papers receive higher numbers of citations than in the past. These studies suggest that "online availability and growing ease of discovery (e.g. via search engines or other discovery tools) of older and more obscure journal content has played a role."

By accommodating the aforementioned changes in readers’ habits - digitizing printed journal editions or entire archives and migrating them into appropriate hosting platforms - publishers can expand their audiences and secure higher citation count.

SEO impact on citations count

Optimizing your content for search engines by using internal and external SEO practices can significantly improve your journals' performance regarding citations of the articles featured in it. 

While the authors should make sure they incorporate relevant keywords in their content and the structural parts (titles, headings, abstracts, etc.), the publishers can make the publications even more accessible by hosting their journals in publishing platforms with built-in SEO tools and features. Full-text HTML, mobile-friendly interface and article sharing options increase the chances of more citations and thus help journals build their reputation as relevant scholarly sources.

PubliMill - a journal publishing platform designed to promote your content online and increase citations.

In addition to easy content management and attractive user interface, it's important to choose a publishing platform that also ensures the journal's discoverability and better citation prospects.

 PubliMill is a journal publishing platform that serves your essential publishing needs with full-text HTML file format, convenient interface for digitized content, built-in SEO features, and more useful functionalities intended to enrich your content and improve your performance as a publisher.