This article is specifically for folks in academia... When writing a journal paper, targeting the right venue is an important consideration. There are lots of factors that go into this decision: audience, prestige, historical topics of interest, turn-around time, open access, etc. Discussing all the considerations in detail is too taxing and is probably not actionable (it's too dependent on your research and goals). But I thought I'd share... I'm tracking the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) impact factors for various robotics journals. In very general terms, the impact factors can give you a rough approximation of journal quality and help you target your publications. You can find a historical plot of robotics journals' impact factors (along with the latest values) below. I'll try to keep these up to date.
Update 11/3/2011: Jan Peters from TU Darmstadt's Intelligent and Autonomous Systems group also maintains a historical account of robotics (and machine learning) journals' impact factors, complete with discussion and analysis. He also has a page that discusses AI / Machine Learning / Robotics conference quality (a pseudo-ranking).
Current Data (2010 end-of-year results, valid through 2011):
Discussion:
You'll notice that some journals are not represented in this list; these are the ones listed in ISI's "robotics" category and do not include diverse fields related to robotics (eg. machine learning or computer vision). Sometimes these other domain-specific journals may be a better fit for you work, so consider them too!
As of right now (November 2011, so 2010 end-of-year rankings), the top robotics journals by impact factor are IJRR (4.095), JFR (3.593), TRO (3.063), RAM (2.187) and AURO (2.033). This isn't too surprising. Drastically over-generalizing: IJRR is the dominant "theory" venue; JFR for long-term (real-world) deployments; TRO for applications, systems, and sensing; RAM for a more general-purpose audience; and AURO for autonomous systems. Many of the journals also have "special issues" that focus on a particular topic and have blinding-fast turn-around times. These are a great option when they're available!
Still... the robotics journals pale in comparison to the "top" scientific publications: Science (31.377) and Nature (36.104). Every now and again, we'll see a really nice robotics paper crack into one of these venues -- usually with a more biological bent.
But on the plus-side, it looks like robotics is generally trending up. Plus, I think a lot of momentum isn't accurately reflected in this graph. There has been quite an uptick in publications at conferences (eg. ICRA, IROS, RSS, HRI, etc). Much like computer science, robotics conference papers are highly-regarded on their own -- plus you get to travel! More seriously, now that IROS / ICRA are ~15 simultaneous tracks... I don't understand why some of the major journals (particularly the IEEE ones) haven't teamed up to create a "journal" track at the conferences. This would give researchers in more traditional fields (eg. EE, ME, BME) the best of both worlds: a journal paper to appease their home schools and a chance to present to self-selecting peers (networking and travel!). Get on that IEEE folks! ;-)
Anyway, this topic is particularly salient for me right now -- I'm currently writing journal paper(s) using my dissertation material. I hope you find the data useful. Oh yeah, I wrote a glorious python script to (semi-)automate the impact factor parsing from HTML, so this should be pretty easy to update in the future. If this post gets out of date, just let me know!
Also here is another good website to look up the impact factor for robotic related journals.
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