Bibliometrics and Altmetrics: Measuring the Impact of Knowledge

Determining the acceptance rates of individual journals or within specific disciplines is a necessary part of promotion and tenure activities. Journals with lower article acceptance rates are regarded as more prestigious and being published in one tends to be viewed very positively during the tenure review process.

Publishers calculate their journals acceptance rates in various ways:

1. Some journals use all manuscripts received as a base for computing this rate.
2. Other journals calculate the acceptance rate using only reviewed manuscripts, not on all manuscripts received.  

Finding journals acceptance rates is a tricky and time consuming process. Start early!

1. Elsevier Journal Insights. Provides acceptance rates for many Elsevier journals. NOTE: Use the "Find Other Journals" search box on the right side of the page to look up specific journal titles.
2. Check societies' web sites. Sometimes they publish acceptance rates for their journals on their home pages. A Google search using the "name of the journal" (use quotes) or the "name of the society" will usually take you to the home page. Add the words "acceptance rate" to the search string.
3. Contact the editor of the journal to see if they will share the acceptance rate. A good approach is to ask how many submissions the journal receives a year. Then you can calculate the rejection rate by dividing the number of articles published in the last year by the number received. For example, a journal that receives thirty submissions annually and publishes only ten, has a rejection rate of 66 percent (returned 2 out of every 3 submissions). The acceptance rate, therefore, would be 34%.