Choosing a journal for your scientific manuscript needs to be done strategically. Your first choice of journal might not choose to review your manuscript – that’s fine. But you don’t want to bother submitting to a journal that has a very low likelihood of reviewing your article in the first place. That’s where the strategy behind choosing a journal for manuscript submission becomes very important. You don’t want to waste your time formatting your submission for journals that would never be interested in your manuscript (regardless of how good it is), because this will delay your overall publication timeline.
Basic Considerations when Choosing a Journal
Here are some basic considerations when choosing a journal to which to submit your manuscript:
Choose a Popular Journal
Journals can be published by large, established publishers (like Elsevier and SpringerLink), or they can be published by more niche publishers. The bigger ones tend to be more popular and have a larger readership. Also, the more often the journal publishes issues, the bigger the audience they have. People are also more likely to read open access articles that are available freely on the internet.
Choose a Journal that Matches your Topic
I’ve seen many beginning science writers get fixated on submitting their manuscript to a particular journal that is popular in their field, only to have the journal not accept it for review because the topic does not fall within their scope. On the journal’s web site, go to the “aims and scope” page, and read it. If you don’t think your manuscript matches what they are looking for, don’t bother submitting to that journal.
Consider the Article Types they Accept
All journals accept “original research” – meaning research where you are reporting on a study you did by applying the scientific method. The article type may be called “original research”, or may have a different label (such as “research study” and “original research”). If you have this type of manuscript, you can submit to any journal.
However, if you have written a review, a commentary, or some other type of article, you need to make sure the journal is interested in that type of article. The “instructions to authors” page on the journal’s web site usually describes the types of articles they accept.
If you can’t find this on the web site, you can always create an account in their online submission platform and look into it there. Anyone can create an account as part of considering whether you want to submit to the journal or not. If you choose not to, you can just abandon the account.
Make Sure you Avoid Predatory Journals
If you receive an e-mail from a journal inviting you to invite your manuscript, use caution! Legitimate journals do this, so if you investigate and find it is a legitimate journal, that’s great. If you have already written a manuscript, you can send an abstract to them and ask them if it is within their aims and scope. With any luck, they will answer, “Yes” or “No”, and guide you as to whether or not to answer their invitation by submitting your manuscript.
However, predatory journals – which are illegitimate journals that do not follow the COPE guidelines when reviewing your paper, and are just scams looking for your money – often use e-mail marketing to try to get you to fall for their scam. Predatory journals use predatory publishers – so if you find the journal is published by a legitimate scientific publisher (like Elsevier and SpringerLink), then the journal is legit.
But of course, if the journal is published by a small scientific publisher that’s not a popular as Elsevier or SpringerLink, it can be hard to figure out if it’s a predatory journal or not. In that case, looking it up on Beall’s List can be helpful. This website provides insight into the legitimacy of journals and scientific publishers.
Tips for Choosing a Journal
If you have already written your manuscript, it can be easier to choose a journal to target. Here are tips you can use to target a journal if your manuscript is already written.
Look at the Articles you Cited
I use Zotero as my reference manager, and I highly recommend it. I recently wrote a manuscript, and I looked at the publications I cited by filtering them in Zotero and then sorting the article records by journal name, as shown in the graphic.
As you can see in the graphic, in this particular manuscript, I cited a diversity of journals. If you find you have cited several papers from the same journal, you should definitely consider that journal for your submission. My next step will be to investigate the web pages of the journals, and decide which one would be the most optimal for my first submission.
Use Journal Recommendations Engines from Publishers
Popular publishers have set up journal recommendation engines. I’ll provide you links to a few:
These web sites present you with a form. You paste your abstract into the form and submit it, and then it gives you a list of potential journals. I demonstrated using SpringerLink for this in the graphic below.
While these journal recommenders seem like a good idea, there are several ways in which they are not totally awesome. First, you have to investigate each journal carefully. They may recommend journals where your topics is not really in their aims and scope. Second, they are only recommending journals from their publishing house. For this reason, you might want to try different recommendation engines, because you will definitely get different results for each publisher.
An Important Point About Indexes
If you are getting into scientific publishing, you have probably heard of indexes such as Scopus, PubMed, Web of Science, EBSCO, and others, where you can search for articles in scientific journals. In the olden days, before the internet, these businesses were independent from the publishers. Journals had to achieve an elite status in order to be indexed in these various databases.
Now, this has all changed. Indexes now collaborate closely with publishers, and so they are no longer independent. This has resulted in predatory publishers being indexed in these previously elite indexes. Also, the search functions on these indexes are not very good. I prefer to use Google Scholar for all my article searches.
Unfortunately, because of the economic collusion between indexes, journal publishers, and academic institutions, often students and professors are incentivized to publish in journals that are not only indexed in these poorly-functioning and biased databases, but are rated highly (e.g., in the highest quartile of how “influential” it is).
Again, this is all a scam, but unfortunately, if you are a science writer, through these pressures, you are forced to participate in this scam. How you figure out the rank of your journal is you go to the SCImago web site and search for it. Below, I show the results from searching for one of the journals I cited in my most recent manuscript.
As you can see in the graphic, the Journal of China Tourism Research has rankings in several disciplines: Cultural Studies, Linguistics and Language, and Tourism, Leisure, and Hospitality Management. If you actually go to the web site and do this search, you will see that when you hover over the green squares, it says “Q1”, while the yellow squares say “Q2” and the red squares say “Q3”.
As you can see, the rankings are dynamic – they change every year. For me, these results should dissuade me from submitting to this journal, because the work I’m doing is considered to be in Tourism, Leisure, and Hospitality Management, and that is most recently rated Q2. However, my colleague in the field of Linguistic and Language could submit here, because in her area of expertise, this journal is rated Q1.
How have you been scammed in academic publishing? Tell your story in the comments!
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Choosing a journal for your scientific manuscript needs to be strategic, or your publication will be delayed. Read my blog and take my advice!
