Selecting a Journal for Publication

Most scholars have a ready knowledge of the prestigious journals in their fields of expertise but may not be familiar with less well-known journals that are equally suitable for the publication of their work. Newer and interdisciplinary journals often fall into this second category. There are many reasons to consider submitting an article to a “less prestigious” or lower ranked journal: the topic of an article, the type and size of a journal's readership, the waiting periods between submission, acceptance, and publication, or a journal's acceptance rate. This guide introduces resources that identify journals by subject matter, access model, journal metrics, and authors' rights. It also offers a selection of general and discipline-specific writing guides.

Assessing the suitability of an unfamiliar journal requires little effort. Generally, academic publishers provide the needed information on a journal’s website. Expect to find facts and statements about a journal’s scope, intended audience, its editorial board, the type of peer-review process adopted, author guidelines, copyright agreements, journal rankings and other scholarly metrics, and indexing services. This information may be found in the About section or under Author Guidelines. Depending on discipline and access models, a journal website may also include policies on research data, open access, and self-archiving, publication fees (if any), acceptance rate, and average time from submission to publication.

Journals that lack transparency regarding this type of publication information should be closely scrutinized to avoid submitting one’s work to a predatory publisher. The primary goal of predatory publishers is financial gain with minimal to no editorial processing. Predatory journals have grown aggressively in recent years. Scholars looking for publishing outlets are often misled with journal names that mimic those of well-established recognized journals and various other ploys. Duke University Medical Center Library & Archives has created the be iNFORMED checklist to assist scholars with the evaluation of unfamiliar publishers. Some of the databases listed under Finding Journals and Open Access Publishing can also be consulted for this purpose.

• Identifying Journals introduces tools that assist with the discovery of academic journals by discipline and field of study.
• Journal Metrics presents an overview of common journal metrics (impact factors and altmetrics) and resources that track one or more impact factors.
• Open Access Publishing lists resources that identify and assess open access journals. It also describes the Library's Scholarship Open Access Reserve (SOAR) fund in support of article processing fees.
• Authors' Rights provides information on issues and resources related to publication agreements and intellectual property.
• Writing Guides lists selected general and discipline-specific guides to writing and publishing.

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