Scholarly Publishing Guide: Choosing a Journal

Choosing a Journal

 

There are several things you might look for when choosing a journal. 

Some are essential like a relevant research scope.

Others will vary depending on your aims for a paper in a given moment of your career, for example,

  • quality / transparency
  • audience
  • accessibility
  • speed
  • editorial care
  • responsible handling of plural knowledges: cultural / linguistic /other worldviews

to name a few

Your publishing strategy will inform which among these qualities is most important to you at a given time

This page covers some of the main reasons that researchers use to pick a journal, these often interconnect. And you may have different reasons for choosing a journal than the one's listed here.

You can use the links below to navigate directly to a criteria that interests you:

 

Research Scope                                                                     Quality Indicators  (Ethics & Integrity, Journal Metrics; Editorial Board)
Speed Accessibility (Open Access)
Vital Sources of Information about Journals Links to Explore More Information

 

Across all of these categories, you'll most of find the information you need in just three sources:

 

  1. Journal webpages

  2. Scimago 

  3. Talking to other researchers in your field

 

Click through the slide decks below for tips on how to use the first two strategically  

Research Scope

 

This is the most essential criteria for selecting a journal.

Ultimately, the goal is for your research to be read the right knowledge communities. 

Finding a journal with the right research scope will help you to reach the right readership

In addition, papers submitted to journals even slightly "out of scope" will be desk rejected by the journal editors, and this will waste your time and theirs.

  all journal's have an Aims & Scope statement on their website that outlines their research parameters and the kinds of inquiries and approaches within those fields that they want to attract

 

It seems obvious to suggest that you select a journal that publishes research on your paper's subject area

  But most journal editors wade through, and desk reject, 100s of out of scope submissions every few months

There are a few different reasons for this:

  • Academic workloads and time constraints may lead academics to use publisher's algorithmic tools, or GenAI tools, to chose a journal for them. These tools are not yet as accurate as you would be at understanding the nuance of research inquiry and where it fits. 
  • A clear contributing factor is that journals Aims & Scope statements are not always easy to interpret - and some are intentionally vague.

Here are some quick ways to ensure a journal's research scope fits your paper:

 

  1. Compile a list of journals in scope:
  • Your paper's reference list will contain relevant journal titles
  • Look at where other key researchers on the topic, whose work you admire, have published
  • Search for your topic in relevant library database and compile a list from the results
  • Ask colleagues

Once you've narrowed the research scope down to 2 or 3 journal titles

  1. Visit the each journal homepage and rather than just reading their Aims & Scope, most journals will have a "search within this journal" function, use it to find similar studies to your own:

           

  • the results will tell you whether the journal covers your field of inquiry well
  • the results will also show you the kinds of methods, conceptual approaches, and formats that the journal has published on your topic

its a clever and quick way of ensuring you are submitting to a journal that fits your study

 

Quality 

There are many different indicators of what constitutes a quality journal. In the tabs below we list some, and reveal how to verify each  

You will have your own view of the indictor that quality carries the most weight in relation to your research and academic approach

 

Its always helpful to look at a journal's editorial board

Its not just about the prestige or reputation of editors, but rather:

Editorial boards can tell you a lot about the knowledge communities that interact with the journal, and therefore about the journal's readership

Look at the editorial board of a journal to learn about:

  • Its global engagement & representation.
    •  is the editorial board concentrated in one geographic region/university? Or are different places/perspectives and institutional cultures represented?
  • The expertise and scholarship that informs the journal's research aims

Peer Review Policy

Most journals will have a brief statement outlining their peer review policy and editorial screening process on their website. 

There are different models of peer review.

  • The most common is double blind: where at least two anonymous independent peer reviewers are solicited per article
  • Some journals guarantee only a single anonymous review
  • Others use open identified peer review processes. This is referred to as Open Peer review

This resource from journal publisher Taylor and Francis offers more insights into these peer review models 

It's important that a journal makes their peer review processes clear and easy to find on their website.

 

Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Membership

Another good indication that journal publishers and editors take publishing ethics and integrity seriously, is if they are members of COPE. COPE provides guidance and training for journal editors and publishing editors to strengthen ethical practices in scholarly publishing.

The committee has helped journals to implement funding declarations for all funding research submitted, ethics integrity confirmation for research with human data, practices to help journals monitor self-cites and other forms of citation manipulation, transparency around AI use, and more.

Journals will often declare their COPE membership on their webpage, as in the example below, taken from the Sage journal Psychological Science

Here too are some examples of peer review policy statements from journal webpages:

 

Some journals are linked to Associations / Societies.

Associations (sometimes called Societies) are peak professional or research bodies in a given subject area, and they are usually regional or country-based too.

Journals affiliated with an association/society will

  1. Likely have a carefully vetted editorial board with good professional standards and responsible/transparent processes in place. Likely, not guaranteed. 
  2. They also have an established readership community around them: since association members often receive a subscription to the journal with their membership. So there'll be an extended network of past, current and future members who will gain access to your work - though there's no guarantee that they will read it! 

Does the journal's content regularly end up in your reading list?

Would you willingly sign up to receive email alerts when the latest issue is published?

Answering yes to either of these questions suggests you have found a quality journal in your field

Journal level metrics aim to provide a picture of a journal's impact and standing in a field

There are different types of journal metrics.

All quantify some form of end-user data: such as citations, article downloads, or article clicks.

  These are located on journal webpages (see slide 6 of the presentation at the top of this page on journal webpages for detailed examples)   

A few are widely used among research administrators to discern a journal's quality. These are:

  • The Impact Factor (Web of Science)
  • SJR (Scopus)
  • Quartiles (Scopus / Scimago)

You can learn more about each of these by visiting the "Understanding Journal Metrics" page on this guide.

Quantitative measures of quality or rank are always only a partial picture

Because of this there have been several campaigns to limit the influence of Journal-level metrics on researchers' career pathways and funding opportunities.

The most significant of these is the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA)

Signatories of DORA commit to 

"Not using journal-based metrics, such as Journal Impact Factors, as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles, to assess an individual scientist’s contributions, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions".

Beware of Hijacked & Cloned Journals

Very rarely, journals' web profiles get hijacked, cloned, or their submission processes targeted by papermills or other unethical practices.

So it is always best to access journal information and submission processes from their publisher-hosted webpages

Hijacked/Cloned journals impersonate legitimate journals by taking on their web profiles, ISSN identifiers, metadata/indexing and other means.

You can learn more about the unethical underworld of scholarly publishing at Retraction Watch

If you are concerned about the integrity of a journal title you can investigate by:

  • Searching for it on the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker 
  • Or looking the journal title up on Scimago, and reading the comments section. Unethical or poorly run journals often attract a string of comments from authors who have had bad experiences.

 

Need for Speed

Sometimes getting a paper out quickly is the most important consideration

 

  1. In these cases, you can assess a journal's average turnaround time by looking at the Speed Metrics published on their webpage

 To learn more about the kinds of speed metrics available and where to find them, take a look at slides 4 & 6 on this presentation.

  1. Keep in mind that highly ranked (especially Q1) journals receive the largest volume of article submissions in their field, which can put pressure on editorial workloads and the timeliness of processes on occasion. So if you have a need for speed and a need for Q1, its essential to look at the speed metrics of the journal you are interested in.

 

Accessibility 

Open Access (OA)

 
Publishing your article OA removes some (not all) financial barriers to your research being read & used widely

It is an important consideration if you are committed to maximizing research access as a social good 

 

It may also be a mandatory requirement of your research funder, see, for example

Many International Research Funders have similar stipulations. Some employing or collaborating institutions may require that you publish OA in their Repositories.

  You'll find more information for understanding Open Access and Repositories in the dedicated OA page of this guide 

 

Publishing your journal article OA will likely have benefits for its Research Impact 

In terms of Citation Impact and Social Impact

 

Open Access publications attract more total citations, and those citations come from scholars in a wider range of locations, institutions, and fields of research (Huang, Neylon & Montgomery 2024)

 

The increase in total citations is known as the Open Access Citation Advantage (OACA); first proposed by Lawrence (2001)

  • Research on OACA is contested: the advantage varies significantly according to discipline, as well as type of OA publication (i.e. Gold, Green, etc.)
  • Huang, Neylon & Montgomery's 2024 argue that there is a Open Access Diversity Citation Advantage (OADCA). They claim that even though the OACA is inconsistent across disciplines and publishing models, the OADCA is not. 
  • Publishing Open Access therefore, widens the arena of research use.
  • Yet the largest citation advantage for journal publications comes from funded research. Dorta-González and Dorta-González (2023) found that articles reporting funded research receive 50% more citations regardless of discipline or publication type.

 

  Finding Open Access Options for Your Article

 

For Open Access journals 

More commonly, Hybrid Journals offer traditional subscription (paywalled) publishing and open access options 

 

Accessibility of Published Article

You may also want to know how accessible your paper will be for different readers

Some journal publishers offer more accessibility options than others 

If you are interested, check:

 whether the article can be read in an EPUB format, which has more accessibility options

 whether articles have an audio option, enabling users to play or download (MP3 file) an audio reading of papers

 

 And, whether the journal webpage is optimized for mobile devices

 

Links to Explore More 

 

Choosing a Journal

  • A good Checklist Tool from Think, Check, Submit, for appraising your journal choice

Open Access and Research Impact

Equity & Diversity in Journal Publishing

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