Scholarly Publishing

How can you identify journals in which to publish your work? Start by looking at the journals you read, that your colleagues read and where they publish, and who you cite in your own work. Is there a pattern to those journals?

When considering a journal as a potential place to publish, ask yourself:

• Does the subject matter covered in the journal match your scholarship?
• Do the types of articles published and article length guidelines match with what you want to submit?
• Are you or your colleagues familiar with the journal? Look at its affiliation and publisher, and the editorial board and authors who publish in it
• What is the reputation of the journal? Look at impact factor or other relevant metrics.
• Are articles peer-reviewed?
• Does the journal have an ISSN, and do articles have DOIs?
• Is the journal indexed in a service that you use
• Who is the audience and what is the readership of the journal?
• What are the journal’s copyright policies? Are there fees to publish? Open access options?
• What is the typical timeframe from submission to publication?

You can also look at the Think Check Submit checklist, use a journal evaluation tool [pdf], or talk to the library! We can help identify potential journals related to your field, and offer a number of tools that may help you locate an appropriate journal.

• IEEE Publication Recommender

  Searches 170+ periodicals and 1500+ conferences from IEEE, provides factors such as Impact Factor and Submission-To-Publication Time.

• Jane (Journal Author/Name Estimator)

  Enter your article title and/or abstract of the paper in the box, and click on 'Find journals', 'Find authors' or 'Find Articles'. Jane will then compare your document to millions of documents indexed in Medline to find the best matching journals, authors or articles.

• JSTOR Text Analyzer

  Drag and drop a copy of your article into the Text Analyzer, and the tool will find similar content in JSTOR. Consider the journals that those papers are published in.

• Open Journal Matcher

  This tool compares the similarity of user-submitted abstracts with abstracts from the Directory of Open Access Journals, and provides a list of the 5 top matching journals. It is fully open source and interdisciplinary.

• Springer Journal Suggester

  Enter your manuscript title & abstract, and the Journal Suggester will search over 2,500 Springer and BioMed Central journals to find suitable journals for your manuscript.