A Guide to School Counseling and Clinical Mental Health Counseling

School Counseling Journals

Clinical Mental Health Counseling Journals

Journal Rejection Rates:

Some journals may have information on rejection rates in their "about" section. Rejection rates for journals published by the American Psychological Association can be found in the APA's Journal Statistics and Operations Data.

Journal Rankings:

Journal Citation Reports creates a Journal Impact Factor (or JIF) by dividing total articles by total cites per year. The immediacy index index shows average citations during the first year of publication. Both indexes should be used to compare journals within the same fields or disciplines.

Eigenfactor  measures a journal's importance to the scientific community, it gives heavier weight to journals that produce more articles. Article Influence, their alternative to impact factor, measures the average influence of each article within a journal over the past 5 years - with a mean score of 1.0. Eigenfactor removes potential biases such as self-citing, and takes into account where citations appear.

Google Scholar Metrics  lists the top 100 journals in various subject categories, using the h-index.  This metric increases with the number of influential papers, and is less likely to be skewed by a few very highly cited articles.

Additional information on journals:

What is Peer Review?

Peer review is a process where one or more experts (often three), in the same or similar fields, will read an article or paper and examine whether the research methods are valid and whether the conclusions make sense. They might also look at the importance and utility of the research, as well as the quality of the authors’ writing. If the article or paper is not good enough, it will not pass the peer-review process, and it will go unpublished.

However, just because an article is peer-reviewed does not mean it is perfectly accurate and reliable. See retractionwatch.com for examples of articles where peer-reviewers missed or were unaware of problems with a publication they reviewed.

How can find out if an article is peer reviewed?

1) Go to the journals' website. If the journal is peer reviewed you can often find this information in the sections on author guidance or the about page.

2) Check Ulrichsweb Global Serials Directory (i.e. Ulrich's). Search for a journal (not the article title), if it has a referree-shirt icon next to the journal, that means the journal is refereed (another term for peer review).

Note: Even though a particular journal is peer-reviewed, some articles, such as news items, editorials, letters to the editor, and book reviews, may not have gone through the peer-review process.

Elements of a peer reviewed article

• a title that provides a mini-synopsis of the research project
• an abstract --usually a paragraph long -- which provides a summary of the research project and findings
• an introduction that provides the scope and objectives of the research project
• a section explaining materials and/or methods used
• the results that were found -- often in the form of data, tables, graphs, etc.
• A discussion and/or conclusion describing the significance and relevance of the findings
• A list of cited references to other publications that the authors consulted in designing and developing their research project