Choose the right journal to publish your research

How do you choose journals? Is it based on its prestige within your field? Its Impact Factor? Or based on the readers you are trying to influence? One of the more common questions I receive at our Nature Masterclasses workshops is choosing the right journal.

And that is a great question. You have worked so hard on your study, yet you can only publish it once. You want to make sure that you find the best home for your study. Otherwise, if people cannot find it, all of your hard work will have been wasted. I don’t want that to happen to you!

Another question I often receive about journal selection is…does it really matter? If you publish and your research is online, isn’t that all that matters? People can still find your study, regardless of the journal it is published in, right? Yes and no. I will address this key point in this newsletter as well, as it is another common comment I hear from researchers.

Generally, I recommend a 2-step process when choosing the best journal for your study:

1. Begin with a shortlist of maybe 10-12 journals
2. Carefully evaluate those journals based on 5 or 6 important key factors

Let’s start with step 1…the easier one. ??

Step 1

How do you choose these journals to consider? Most researchers use 4 strategies:

1. Your reading. If you are reading a lot of papers from a specific journal, it is probably because they are publishing a lot of studies related to your research. Therefore, it makes sense to add those journals to your shortlist.
2. Your colleagues. Please discuss with your co-authors and colleagues. They likely have some great suggestions based on their experience that you can also add to your shortlist.
3. Databases. Go to frequently used databases in your field and put in keywords related to your research. Which journals seem to be publishing many articles related to your topic? Are they already on your shortlist? If not, be sure to add them!
4. Journal selection tools. There are a number of online tools that can help you. I recommend avoiding publisher-specific online selection tools as they are limited to the journals they publish. To get a broader selection, use publisher-independent tools like those from Edanz, American Journal Experts, or Editage.

At this point, you should hopefully have a good number of potential journals to consider. Step 1 is done! Let’s now move on to step 2.

Step 2

Step 2 involves evaluating each of those journals on your shortlist based on 5 or 6 key factors. I suggest you do this with your co-authors for two reasons.?

• One, all of the authors need to agree on the journal…so choosing it together simply makes sense.?
• Two, this evaluation is qualitative. As we know, qualitative assessments can be biased. So using 2 or 3 independent assessors with discussion helps to mitigate that bias and helps you feel confident that your choice is the best one.

Key factors

There are 5 to 6 key factors to consider. The first 5 are essential, number 6 is optional (you will see why): aims and scope, recently published articles, indexing, publication model, selectivity, and publishing speed.

1. Aims and scope. This is definitely the most important. Editors have a responsibility to their journals to publish research that is within the journal’s scope. This gets to the question above as to why this is still important to consider if, after publication, your article is visible online anyway. But to get published, you first need to convince the editor that your paper is going to be interesting to their readership. That is why this is still essential. So, read the aims and scope and ensure that the scope of your topic matches with the scope of their journal.
2. Recently published articles. You want to ensure that you are adding value to their journal. The best way to do this is to see what they have published already related to your topic and identify what is new or unique about your study that they have not published yet. This should be the key focus of your paper and your cover letter so that the journal editor does not see you study as being redundant with what they have already published, but adding real value to their journal.
3. Indexing. You need to be visible online. So check the indexes that the journal is listed in. Is it listed in the key databases in your field? If so, great! You will be visible to your peers if you publish in that journal. If it is not, I recommend to remove that journal from consideration. Do not sacrifice the visibility of all of your hard work…it is not worth it! And the more databases the journal is indexed is works to your advantage. You never know which databases people use to find research…so maximize your advantage!
4. Publication model. For this, I mean open access. If you want your research to be accessible to as many people as possible, open access will help. This includes researchers in developing countries where their institutions cannot afford expensive subscription fees as well as those outside of academica. Time and time again, studies have shown that articles published open access are more visible and often (depending on the quality of the study!) more frequently cited.
5. Selectivity. We all want our papers published in prestigious journals, but remember that those journals are incredibly selective! Most have acceptance rates of only 5-10%. That means, you have to be in the top 20% of submitted papers to even be considered! How can you know if you are? Highly selective journals usually consider three issues:?(a) Do you have a significant breakthrough that has not been shown before? These journals are not interested in derivative studies, (b) Do you have enough well-controlled and significant evidence to support your conclusions? and (c) Is your research broadly applicable or useful? Most highly selective journals are broad-focused journals. So the broader the applicability of your research, the more interesting it will be for them.
6. Publication speed (optional). Why do I make this optional? For two reasons. One, not all journals share their publication speed. And two, it is often not useful for assessment. For the first point, you need to check the journal’s website. But let me discuss the second point in greater detail. Many journals share one average publication speed. For me, that is useless. They are dividing ALL the submissions by the time it took to either reject or accept the manuscript. As most submissions are rejected without peer review (within 1 to 2 weeks), this considerably skews the publication speed. Further, averages (means) are not statistically relevant when using a skewed distribution that most publication times are. Medians are more appropriate.?

To address the issue of publication speed, Nature provides:

• Two metrics instead of one: time to first editorial decision and time to acceptance (after peer review). Breaking down these two steps makes it more relevant to researchers as the first one is dependent on the editors alone, while the second metric is influenced by both the reviewers and the authors (how long it takes them to revise).
• Nature also provides the median rather than the mean (average), as we feel the latter is not statistically appropriate (publication speed is highly skewed to the left as most submissions are rejected without review, and therefore a non-parametric distribution).

Together, because most journals do not provide this careful and statistically appropriate breakdown, I feel that publication speed is not appropriate for most journals, unfortunately.?

So, there you have it! After evaluating all the journals on your shortlist for these 5 or 6 key factors, it will hopefully be a lot clearer to you which journal is the best one for your research.

Do you have any additional strategies you would like to share? Please do so in the comments below!

Good luck with your next journal selection!