Editorial boards (sometimes also called advisory boards) area much more distant influence on what journals do than are the editors. But the extent to which a journal has well-known and senior people on its editorial board can provide a fair indication of where it stands in the international profession. If it has no one well known involved as aboard member it may have only a very small circulation, or there maybe some problem in its approach to refereeing.
Professional ownership versus commercial ownership.
In general, journals run by professional bodies in each of the disciplines have higher prestige than those which are chiefly setup by commercial publishers and entrepreneurial academics to earn a major buck. Professional journals are normally supplied free to members of the professional association as part of their overall subscription, which tends to mean that far more individual readers in at least its home country will routinely notice that your paper has been published. There are far fewer individual subscriptions
to commercial journals, and so readers mainly have to come across your paper in the library or look it up directly. The chief reasons why people find your material are because they regularly search particular journals electronic contents because a colleague or the journal’s email alerting service draws their attention to it or because they are starting anew article or research project of their own and hence are doing a systematic literature trawl.
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