Choosing a journal for publication: top 5 tips

This post is for all budding authors out there, whether you’re a clinician thinking about publishing the results of a trial or a case report, or a PhD student looking to publish based on your research.

Millions of articles are submitted to biomedical journals every year. Sadly a high percentage of these articles fail to make it through peer review, resulting in the heartbreak of rejection for their authors.

How can you avoid having this fate befall you? There are a few things you can do to maximise your chances of getting published. One of those things is to think carefully about which journal you submit to, making sure you choose something relevant and appropriate.

Here, to help you plan your submission, are our top 5 tips on choosing a journal…..

1. Start thinking about possible journals BEFORE you start writing

If possible start thinking about potential journals when you’re at the planning stage of your research project. The earlier in your research that you can identify potential journals, the easier it is for you to build any article requirements those journals have in to your project – see tip 5 for more detail.

2. Which journals publish the papers that you’re building on with your own research?

If you’ve been doing research on a particular topic for a while, you’re probably already aware of what the key, influential papers on that topic are. Most importantly, you’ll also know which journals those papers have been published in. Noting which journals the papers that you are referencing in your own research on have been published in can be a quick way to identify a likely candidate for your own article.

3. Search bibliographic databases to identify popular journals for your field

If you’re struggling to identify existing articles on a similar topic to your own, run a quick search on a database such as Medline, Embase or Web of Science. Looking through the results of that search should help you to draw up a list of the main journals publishing in that field.

4. Try using an article matching tool

There are freely available tools which use algorithms to match text against relevant journals. One example is JANE: Journal/Author Name Estimator.  JANE allows you to paste in a paragraph of text, such as an abstract, and then analyses that text, giving you a list of suggested journals which are a good match topic-wise.  Some publishers such as Elsevier and Springer also have similar freely available tools.

5. Check the journal’s guidance for authors

Once you have a potential journal in mind, check the submission guidance for authors for details of required format and article types accepted. Even if you think you have found a journal that is a great match for your article, you still need to make sure that the type of article you want to submit is one that they accept. Most journals make the instructions for authors readily available on their website.