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Nuts and Bolts of Scholarly Publishing
Scholarly Communication Librarian
Journal Fit
When evaluating a publication venue, consider how well your research fits with the journal and its audience.
Questions to consider when evaluating a journal for fit
Subject area: Does the disciplinary and topical focus of this journal align with your research?
Audience: Who would be most interested in your research, and are they reading this journal? Consider whether your research is more specialized, or of interest to the field as a whole, or interdisciplinary.
Methodology/article type: Is your research qualitative, quantitative, theoretical, or empirical research? Is it a case study, a data paper, a review article, a protocol? Check if the journal publishes this kind of research.
Turnaround time: If you’re in a hurry to publish, you may want to find a journal that has a faster review period. Typically, you can only submit to one journal at a time.
Funder policies: Your funder might care about where you publish and what the publisher will let you do with your article (such as deposit it in an open access repository). This might influence where you choose to publish your article.
Finding journals that fit your research
Try a "journal recommender" -- these are tools that analyze your paper (usually the title and abstract) and suggest journals that might fit your paper's subject area:
- Jane: Journal/Author Name EstimatorJane compares your document (or keywords) to the PubMed database to find matching journals, authors or articles. Best for medical/health sciences disciplines.
- Journal Finder (Elsevier)Recommends journals published by Elsevier that may fit your research.
- Journal Suggester (Springer)Searches Springer and BioMed Central journals to find matches for manuscript details you provide.
- EndNote Manuscript MatcherCompares information about your publication with journals in the Web of Science and other citation indexes to suggest publication venues. NOTE: Requires registering for a (free) EndNote account.
- JournalGuideFrom company ResearchSquare, JournalGuide offers a paper matcher and other journal search tools.
Subject databases in your area may list relevant journals indexed in the database. Doing a literature search on your topic within these databases can quickly orient you to relevant journals in your field.
- DatabasesAll UTSA Libraries databases. Browse by title, discipline, or format.
Consult with your peers or advisors, faculty in your field, or your subject librarian.
- Subject LibrariansA list of UTSA subject librarians, by discipline.
Determining the fit of a particular journal
You've found a journal that looks promising -- great! Now what?
Carefully investigate journal’s website. Try sections called Aims and Scope, Instructions, Submissions, Information for Authors, etc. You may have to do some deep digging to find the information you need.
Look through archived articles in the journal to see what kind of work they publish. How well does your research fit with this body of work?
If you need to consider whether the journal publisher policies align with your funder’s requirements, use these tools:
- SHERPA/RoMEOA free service that collects the copyright and open access self-archiving policies on academic journals, so you can make an informed decision about where to publish.
- SHERPA/JULIETUse this tool if you are not sure what your funder’s requirements are for making publications and research data publicly available. Search by funder name to find their policies.