1. Ask your advisor, attending physician, or mentor. Senior authors with more experience in publishing can likely provide good journal recommendations.
2. Take a look at your manuscript's reference list. Consider submitting to a journal that you cite several times in your manuscript.
3. Consider journal impact factors. Journal impact factors, which can be found in SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), are indicators of journal prestige and can give you a sense of how difficult it might be to publish in a journal (in general, higher impact factor = lower acceptance rate).
4. Consult JANE. Enter your manuscript title and/or abstract into JANE (journal/author name estimator) and click 'find journals' to find the best matching journals.
5. Consider journal discoverability and archival policies. Choose a journal that is indexed in major bibliographic databases (look up in NLM Catalog) and allows you to self-archive your manuscript (look up in SHERPA/RoMEO).
6. Consider open access. Publishing in an open access journal can help your article reach a larger audience and receive more citations. Look for journals that have the "DOAJ Seal of Approval" in the Directory of Open Access Journals.
7. Ignore (most) email solicitations. A spam-like email from a journal soliciting manuscript submissions is often a warning sign of an untrustworthy journal. When in doubt, Think. Check. Submit. or ask a librarian.
8. Use Scopus or Web of Science (not available at SJMC). Search for key terms related to your manuscript in Scopus or Web of Science and filter your results by 'source title' to see the journals that publish most frequently in that area.
Have you recently written a paper, but you're not sure to which journal you should submit it?
Maintained by UT Libraries, this database links to the Instructions to Authors from over 6000 journals in life science & health fields.
Excellent online tutorial with 5 modules, developed at University of Colorado, which focuses on publishing in scholarly journals.
"The booklet takes you through the publishing process steps: from writing your article and selecting a journal to the submission and peer review process. It also covers promoting your article and measuring its impact."
Set of lectures, videos, and quick guides for navigating the publication process. Includes writing, peer review, ethics, dissemination and others.
Advice on how to prepare a journal article. See table of contents at left for related information.
Quick over publications and videos on the journal article writing, submission, and publication process.
Includes calls for papers, manuscript preparation guidelines, and other resources for authors.
Series of videos about publishing research in chemsitry.
Good general advice for turning your graduate dissertation into a book.
Questions to ask yourself when choosing a journal, how to u se a journals 'Aims & Scope' to help selection etc. Plus advice on writing your paper, making a submission, etc.
A sereis of short, interactive modules on writing a manuscript, submitting & peer review, open access, and book publishing.
The EQUATOR (Enhancing the QUAlity and Transparency Of health Research) Network is an international initiative that seeks to improve the reliability and value of published health research literature by promoting transparent and accurate reporting and wider use of robust reporting guidelines.
To encourage the free dissemination of research which is often stifled by high journal subscription costs, the scientific and library communities often encourage researchers to publish in Open Access (OA) journals. OA resources are peer-reviewed scholarly resources that are free to access and are freely reproducible with proper acknowledge and citation.
Publication in Open Access journals increases the visibility and research impact of published research, freely provides an access to published research for readers, increases the sharing of the research, and research impact tracking. However, there are disadvantages of publishing in OA journals, which are the varying degree of peer-review process causing low quality research publication, data sharing jeopardize the research of junior researchers, and publication fee.
OA Publication Process: