Let me start with some caveats. First, I couldn’t claim to be an expert in getting published in high impact journal. I’ve had some successes—with articles, for instance, in journals like Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, and Clinical Psychology: Science & Practice—but also numerous failures, including a really disappointing rejection just a few nights ago. Compared to the Michael Barkhams or Clara Hills of this world, I’m a mere novice.
Second, not everyone should, or does, want to get published in higher impact journals. Indeed, for many people, it’s an elitist, Global North-centred system that excludes non-academics and those who aren’t willing to comply with a positivist, scientistic mindset. So this blog is not suggesting that higher impact journals are good to get published in, or better than other journals, or something that all academics (and non-academics) should be aspiring to. But it is written on the basis that, for some academics, getting published in higher impact journals is important: for their careers and, perhaps, more importantly, for the maintenance and development of counselling and psychotherapy programmes in higher education (HE). In the 2000s we witnessed many counselling courses at HE institutes get closed down and, in some cases, this was because the teams were seen as not producing enough research output at a sufficiently high level. So for the maintenance and enhancement of counselling in the UK and globally, it may be really important for academics to be publishing at the highest possible level: not just for them but for the counselling community as a whole.
What is an ‘impact factor’?
So what do I mean by higher impact journals? Well, for those who don’t know, impact is essentially an indicator of the status of a journal, and it’s operationalised in terms of the amount of citations that the average article will have over the two year period from publication (for a more general guide to publishing in therapy journals, see here). You can go to any journal home page and if you look under tabs like ‘Journal Metrics’ you’ll find the impact factor (sometimes specifically called the ‘2-year impact factor’): for instance, for Psychotherapy Research it’s 3.768. This means that, on average, an article in Psychotherapy Research has been cited 3.768 times by other articles, in any other academic journal, over that two year period. Higher is, of course, ‘better’, meaning that articles in that journal are being more widely drawn on by other members of the academic community.
Impact factors for journals vary a lot by particular disciplines. For instance, in the medical and scientific fields, there’s quite a quick turn-over of articles: they come out quickly and then are rapidly drawn on by other members of those disciplinary communities. That means that journals like Science Robotics or Cancer Research can easily have impact factors of 10 or more. In the counselling and psychotherapy research field, impact factors tend to be a bit more modest, though they have increased in recent years. They range from about 1 (e.g., British Journal of Guidance and Counselling) to 5 or more (e.g., Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology), with some of the more psychiatric journals even higher (e.g., Lancet Psychiatry with an impact factor of 27.083).
So by ‘higher impact journals’, I mean counselling and psychotherapy journals with an impact factor of, say, about 2.5 or more. In many instances, these are US-based journals; and, as above, in most cases they are of a relatively positivist, scientistic mindset. There are journals that are more experientially- or constructionistically-focused (like the European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling and BACP’s Counselling & Psychotherapy Research), but mostly they either have a low impact factor or none at all.
Just to note, not having a formal impact factor doesn’t mean that there are no citations to papers in that journal. To have a formal impact factor, a journal needs to be recognised by an organisation called Clarivate (formerly Thomson-Reuters), and they are very selective about the journals that are recognised. Applying for recognition can also be a very slow process. So there are some very good journals, like the Journal of Psychotherapy Integration and Counselling Psychology Quarterly, that don’t have a formal impact factor. However, these days, such journal may calculate their own 2-year impact factor and present it on their site; so a single organisation’s monopoly over impact factors seems, thankfully, to be waning.
‘Playing the game’
As indicated above, nearly all the higher impact journals in counselling and psychotherapy can be quite positivist, scientistic, and realist in their mindset. And the reality is, that’s not likely to change (at least, not in the short term). They’re bombarded with articles and can pick and choose what they want to publish, often with rejection rates of 70% or more. So if you approach them, say, with an autoethnographic study of authenticity in therapy, you can argue with them until you are blue in the face about the importance of reflexivity and the social construction of reality, but they are unlikely to budge. They’re generally quite conservative: they have their ways of doing things, and they simply don’t need to change—whether or not they should. So, as a first and overarching pointer, if you want to publish in these journals, you generally need to ‘play by their rules’. It’s an uncomfortable reality for many of us, but it’s the way things are.
Learn Stats, or Find a Statistician
And this is a first implication of playing by their rules: if you want to stand a good chance of getting published, having a high quality statistical analysis is often a good way in. Most of the higher impact journals prefer quantitative articles to qualitative; indeed, some have explicitly said that they’re not interested in publishing qualitative articles (primarily because they’re seen as lacking generalisability because of low sample sizes). And the stats we’re talking about here is more than just some means and standard deviations (see blog on quantitative analysis, here). We’re talking structural equation modelling, multilevel analysis, cross lag panel designs… the kind of stats that, I know for myself, I can only just about understand—let alone do.
So options are to learn, in depth and detail, one particular statistical method (or a few) and then apply that. Or, and this is what most of us do, bring on board a statistician who is able to do analyses at the requisite level. That latter strategy is fairly pervasive across the research field: you collaborate with someone who specialises in statistics, and pass on the data to them for an in-depth analysis. If you’re at a university, there may well be someone in your department or faculty that has that role—or you can try linking with stats experts at other universities. Generally, someone with an in-depth understanding and specialism in stats is always going to do better than a non-stats person trying to learn a new, specialised method—unless that person really love maths and stats, and has the time and inclination to learn complex methodologies.
Control, Control, Control
Controlled experimental studies (where, for instance, some participants are allocated to an intervention and some are not) are the lifeblood of the psychological field, and they’re very popular amongst the higher impact therapy journals too. Why? Because they are seen as the ‘gold standard’ means of demonstrating causal effects. Everything else—pre-post studies, qualitative research, observational studies, etc.—tend to be seen as correlational only. So if there’s a way of conducting a controlled study in your area of interest (and doing it in a highly rigorous way using, for instance, CONSORT [Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials] guidelines), there’s a good chance of getting it published. Ideally, you’ve also got the numbers of participants to make the trial ‘powered’ at an adequate level (see more about statistical ‘power’, here). That could be 100 or so participants per condition; but even if you cannot achieve that, a ‘pilot’ or ‘feasibility’ study should be possible and publishable (albeit in lower impact journals). Also, a controlled study doesn’t have to be a trial of a full intervention. For instance, you might test the use of a particular homework exercise, or of using visualisations as part of the therapeutic work. Or perhaps you’d give some clients full information about the therapy, and others only basic information, to see if that makes a difference. Whatever you’re line of research interest, controlled trials are nearly always possible; and you can normally also conduct qualitative research alongside them to get a more experiential, in-depth understanding of the intervention effects.
If you’re doing qual, do it systematically
Having said all that, there are higher impact journals who will consider—and do publish—qualitative research, so it’s by no means impossible to get qualitative research published. But, even so, some journals can tend to assess it with a fairly ‘quantitative’, positivistic mindset (what’s been called ‘small q research’). That means that studies with larger samples, and some quantification of themes, may be preferred (for instance, ‘framework analysis’). Also, very importantly, evidence of inter-coder reliability—or some triangulation of coding—may be expected. That means having some means of demonstrating that the coding process wasn’t dependent on just the ratings of one person, but has some ‘objective’ reality. That could be done, for instance, by having two or more analysts working independently on a set of transcripts, and then agreeing together the coding. Or having a group conduct the analysis, as in consensual qualitative research. Another way of doing this would be to have a second coder do some coding and then compare this with the main coder, producing some statistic for inter-rater reliability (such as Cohen’s kappa).
There are exceptions to this. For instance, some higher impact psychotherapy research journals have published interpretative phenomenological analysis studies where there is limited or no evidence of inter-coder reliability (see an excellent example here; an IPA study on the therapeutic relationship in CBT for adolescents). And, hopefully, such kinds of studies are becoming more common in the higher impact journals. However you do it though, what’s essential is that the qualitative research is conducted systematically. That can mean sticking closely to an established, defined methodology (such as reflexive thematic analysis); or, if you are using a mixed or new method, explaining the rationale and the procedures in that very clear. It’s also essential that the methodology is in line with the aims of your research: Why use this method to be trying to answer these research questions? And finally, do make sure you really process the data: spend time with it, examine it in depth, work out what it is really telling you. There really is no easy way to sophisticated knowledge.
Systematic Reviews
If you’re not keen on stats, another option that the higher impact journals are often open to is systematic reviews. These tend to be popular because they are generally well-cited, boosting the impact factor of the journal itself (remember, journal editors will be thinking about how often your article is likely to be cited—they want to keep their impact factors up!). Again, journals often prefer statistically-based reviews of the literature (i.e., meta-analyses), but they can also be open to narrative and other types of in-depth review. If you want to increase your chances of being accepted, though, again it needs to rigorously follow well-established methods for conducting such research. So, for instance, base the review around the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines: with, for instance, multiple coders during the study selection process, flow charts, and formal assessment of bias procedures.
Plan from the Start
One of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in my academic career is starting research projects thinking, ‘Oh, I’m sure this will generate some interesting data,’ and then getting to the end of the data collection process and realising that, actually, it is not quite the right data for a high quality publication. So I’ve learnt that it is really important, if you want to publish in a higher impact journal, to plan right from the start: What the specific aims of the study are, What you want to contribute to the literature, and Where you want to publish it. Different journals have different interests, so having a specific journal in mind for publication (and knowing the kinds of articles that journal publishes) helps to ensure that you are progressing along the required tracks. Michael Barkham, Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Sheffield and a world-leading psychotherapy researcher, says:
I always tell folk when working out plans and methods to imagine how they are going to write this up for a high-quality journal—so your ‘headset’ is the final product that then helps to shape the process. The point here is that having a ‘headset’ of a high-quality journal output from the start becomes the guiding process for delivering better quality research (although it doesn't guarantee publication success).
If you can set your plans out in a study protocol or study analysis plan and then ‘pre-register’ it on a site like the Centre for Open Science, it can then also really help to convey to journal reviewers the rigour with which your study has been conducted. And consult: send your protocol to people who have published in those journals and see what they think. Better to make tweaks at this earlier stage then get all the way to the end of data collection before you realise your method has some severe limitations.
It Takes time
My highest impact journal publication (that I’ve led on) took about six years from conception to publication (the ETHOS study: an RCT on the effectiveness of school counselling), and there was about a decade before that of previous work in the school counselling field. To get published in these journals, you really need to be at the absolute forefront of a field—to know everything there is to know about it—and then to conduct research that is going to significantly take that field forward. So it’s not something you can do overnight, it takes times: to build up expertise, to set out a research study, to gather the requisite amount of data, to write and to finesse a paper with multiple drafts and re-drafts. Generally, developing expertise in a specialist field—and then publishing and publishing on that—is a better strategy that trying to be a generalist (and I say that from my own experience of trying to cover too much). If you get spread too thin, there’s no way that you can be at the forefront of every field. Rather, choose a field—like counselling for people with autism, or empathy in the therapeutic relationship, or moments of deep connection in therapy—and work at it and work at it and keep researching, reading, and linking up with other leading people in that field.
Work in a Team
And that links to team work. It’s very rare these days that people publish papers in leading journals that they’ve written alone. Rather, there’s often a list of three or more—and, in some of the scientific papers, hundreds—of co-authors. That’s because people have developed the research as a team, and having multiple people working with you—within the same institution, or across institutions—is often essential in bringing together the expertise needed to publish research at the highest level. If you’ve got a team, for instance, you can have world-leading expertise in research design, and in statistics (as above), and then in a particular intervention—how many people have all that in themselves? In a team, everyone can help you, as a whole, to ensure you’re at the forefront of that field. And the great thing is, for academic auditing systems like the Research Excellence Framework (REF), it doesn’t matter whether you are the first author or just one of the co-authors, it all counts towards your published ‘outputs’.
If you’re yet to publish in higher impact journals, joining up with (and contributing to) a team of more experienced researchers can give you a crucial toe-hold in this world, says Michael Barkham. ‘It gives you a connection from which you can learn how this work can be done—start as a small cog and progress from there.’ So this is about being a junior partner with more senior colleagues: for instance, conducting the qualitative analysis in a primarily quantitative trial, or being part of a coding team. That way, you can learn the craft of higher impact journal publication, and take things forward from there.
Mentoring
Allowing oneself to be mentored by a well-published researcher, suggests Michael Barkham, can be an essential part of this process. This might be an informal arrangement between colleagues (within or across universities); or a more formal arrangement, such as a PhD programme. In the US and in much of Europe, this is exactly the system that produces so many well-published young researchers. Senior academics take on a small handful of PhD students, and work closely with them—over several years—to produce high impact research. By the time the students have left the PhD programme, they have learnt the skills and requirements of higher impact journal production, and are ready to ‘fly the nest’ and lead research on their own.
Funding
Finding the time to develop that expertise isn’t always easy: not for you, and often not for your potential colleagues. So if you can get funding to pay for your time, and to bring in additional researchers (for instance, through grants from the Economic and Social Research Council), that’s nearly always a great basis for developing high quality research programmes. Getting that funding is tough, no doubt, but there’s numerous potential sources (see, for instance, Research Professional); and the more you can develop expertise in a particular area, the more successful you’re likely to be. Again, it’s about ‘playing the long game’: not one-off attempts at high impact publication, but a long and sustained development of expertise in a particular area, that will eventually bear high quality fruits.
Show Added Value
For the higher impact journals, doing a well-conducted study is not enough. Great, so you did an IPA study the right way, or conducted some high quality statistical analysis, but what does it all mean? Journals are looking for papers that really take the field forward, so you have to make it explicit in your paper what it is that you’re adding to what was already known. Maybe you’ve discovered that clients really value a particular form of therapist self-disclosure, or that relational depth is a key predictor of therapeutic outcomes. Of course, you need to be honest about the limitations of your research; but if it’s all limitations, and null results, and ambiguities, higher impact journals may be more likely to send it back. Why publish something that, at the end of the day, doesn’t tell us too much when they can publish papers that will have clear and robust implications for practice, training, or research?
Don’t Give Up
Maybe this is all a bit bleak, but it’s written from (bitter) experience. And, having said all that, it is really possible to get published in some of the best journals in the world—you just need to be smart and strategic about it. And, perhaps more than anything, you need to be resilient and keep going in the face of rejection (…after rejection, after rejection, after rejection—says a man who is still smarting after his rejection email a few days ago). These higher impact journals can be brutal in assessing work. And they can be infuriating in imposing standards that you may think are totally wrong. But if you keep at it, and learn from the feedback you’re receiving, there’s a good chance that sooner or later you’ll succeed.
Publishing in higher impact journals is hard, it’s really hard. So it can’t be an afterthought or something you think you’ll have a go at as a corollary to something else. For instance, if you’re doing some research primarily as ‘personal development’, but then think, ‘Well, let’s see if the top journals are interested in what I’ve produced,’ the chances are, they won’t be. Rather, as above, if you want to publish in these higher impact journals, this has to be your focus and your goal, your ‘headset’, from the start. And there is a point here, perhaps, for the wider UK counselling and psychotherapy community. If we want to be part of this higher impact publishing world, then organisations (like BACP and UKCP), and counselling academics, need to be oriented this way from the off. We need, for instance, BACP to work with counselling academic groups—as I know they are trying to do—to set up specialised research programmes, with mentoring and PhDs so that there is a sustainable programme of research at the highest possible level.
Should we be compromising to get published in these higher impact journals? I read a brilliant paper by Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke, developers of thematic analysis, on the London Underground into work this morning, and it made me feel like, ‘No, what the hell, we should be developing qualitative and phenomenological and reflexive inquiry in a way that we believe in, and we can and should be getting that work published—at the highest possible level.’ Perhaps so. I honestly don’t know. Maybe the mountain will come to us. I guess, in my own career and in the career of those in the UK counselling field, I just haven’t seen that happen too much. I was a radical in my youth. Now, as I get older and older, I see more and more the virtues of compromise. Or, perhaps more positively, compromise as a means of achieving, ultimately, more radical results. And also, compromise as a respect to those who have different views and takes on the world. There can be an arrogance in radicalism—there was in my own radicalism—which contradicts its very essence.
Finally: writing this blog makes me realise that, ultimately, getting published in higher impact journals is a process, not an outcome: publishing in these top journals needs to be embedded in a wider programme of research, development, and impact. You can’t just go off, on your own, and write a high quality paper (or, at least, I can’t). Rather, it’s about specialising, focusing, developing expertise in a particular field—and being an integral part of a community that is doing the same thing. Then, it’s not that you want to publish in the higher impact journals, it’s that they want to publish you.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Michael Barkham for input and guidance. Photo by alex starnes on Unsplash
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