Tip 1: Define your target journals: How to Publish in High Quality Scientific Journals: 101 Hints and Tips (#0006)

In a previous article, I gave you my definition of what I consider a to be a high-quality journal. This leads to the journals that I target.

Think about your own definition. It will almost certainly be different to mine, as your definition will be informed by your own views, the views of your institution, the views of your peers and where you are in your career. It is important to have something that dictates where you will submit your papers. You should also review your definition regularly, perhaps every two years, just so that it reflects your current thoughts and where you are in your career.

If nothing else, make a list of journals that you would like to publish in. By all means list Nature and Science. They are certainly on my bucket list but we have to be realistic. If we only targeted two or three of the world’s best journal’s then we are setting ourselves up for disappointment. If you look at my web page, I have largely published in two fields; Operations Research and Evolutionary Computing. If you look up these categories on Web of Science, you will see that I have hardly scratched the surface of all the journals that are available. Many of them I do not want to publish in, or more precisely, I could not publish in as, even though they are in my broad area of expertise, they do not actually fall into the scope of my work. There are still journals (I could easily list 50) in those two Web of Science categories that I would like to publish in, and my research areas would certainly fall into the areas that they cover.

These form the core set from which I draw from when I am deciding where to send a paper. Of course, you should always be open to other possibilities. If I am working on a paper that is slightly outside my usual area of interest, then I might target another journal. The idea is to have a set of journals that you would like to publish in so that you have a pre-prepared list every time you start a paper so that you are not looking at a blank sheet of paper for the article, having no idea where you will send the article. At least you will have a set of journals that are on your target list.

It might not be a bad motivational tool to print out your target journals and place it next to your desk then highlight them each time you submit to that journal, or get one published in one of your target journals.

You can see the previous article here.

There is a Table of Contents for this series of articles here.

Book

This series of articles are extracts from the above book. I aim to publish an article each week. Over time, I will publish most of the book on LinkedIn. To get through the entire book is likely to take about 70 weeks.

More information about this series of articles is given in the brief introduction before we started publishing material from the book.

If you are interested in finding more about the book, take a look at its homepage.

If you want to order the Kindle version of the book from Amazon, take a look at this page.

About me

LinkedIn: https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/grahamkendall1/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Graham_Kendall

Web site: https://www.graham-kendall.com

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