Guides: I've Written It, Now Where Do I Publish It?: Home

I've Written It, Now Where Do I Publish It?

Identifying Journals

Selecting the right journal can be critical to getting the article published
Knowing the right journal can be difficult:
- when new to a field
- your first choice rejects the article
Have a fallback option (or two!)
- The bigger the name, the higher the rejection rate
- Academic Medicine rejection rate is 80%
Library-subscribed and free tools exist to help identify journals
- Scopus and SCImago Journal Rank lists journals by subject and those lists can be sorted by journal metrics
Consider doing a search on your broad topic area and looking at the journals in the results
- Some databases may help you do this!
Consider the journals in your bibliography (and also journals in those bibliographies)
Think of the journals in your discipline with sections for education topics or publish education-related articles
What do you need from the journal?
- Does it need to be open access or comply with open access policies of funding agencies?
- Does it need to be highly ranked by journal metrics?
- Which databases does it need to be indexed in (so your article will be discoverable!)?

Open Access Journals

Open-access (OA) journals – articles free to read BUT usually require article processing fees and/or institutional memberships for articles to be published
Directory of Open Access Journals lists over 7,000 open access titles
- Medical Education Online - first ever freely available online journal in the field of medical education
Open access now required for articles resulting from research funded by specific sources (ex. NIH Public Access Policy, Institute of Education Sciences, etc.)
- SHERPA RoMEO and Juliet sites: discover journal copyright and funder requirements

NIH Public Access Policy Considerations

Find Method A Journals

If the article you've written is the result of NIH funding, the final, peer-reviewed manuscripts must be submitted to the NIH Manuscript Submission System (NIHMS) upon acceptance for publication, and be made publicly available on PubMed Central (PMC) no later than 12 months after the official date of publication.

Some Journals automatically post NIH supported papers directly to PMC for you (Method A).

Overview of Submission Methods

Publisher Specific Tools

Publishers may provide tools to help you find their journals that will suit your article.

Metrics and Where to Find Them

Scopus This link opens in a new window
an abstracts and citations database of peer-reviewed literature. It allows for discovery of articles, as well as cited reference searching (number of times an article has been cited). It indexes nearly 23,000 peer-reviewed journals (including open access journals), trade journals, book series, conference proceedings, and pa-tents. Scopus is multidisciplinary, covering life and health sciences, agriculture, environment, engineering, technology, social sciences, landscape architecture, urban planning, and more.

Scopus includes journal metrics, including CiteScore, SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), and Source Normalized Impact per Paper). Click Sources at the top of the page to browse journals by subject or title.

Impact Factor - average number of times articles from the journal published in the past two years have been cited in the JCR year
– in Journal Citation Reports (JCR) - not available in the LIbrary
SCImago Journal Rank - number of weighted citations received in the selected year by the articles published in the selected journal in the three previous years – in SCImago web site
Article Influence – average influence of a journal’s articles over the first 5 years of publication. The mean is 1.00. A score >1 indicates above average influence. AI scores can differ depending on the database coverage –
in JCR and Journal/Author Name Estimator (Jane)

Jane - Journal/Author Name Estimator This link opens in a new window
Have you recently written a paper, but you're not sure to which journal you should submit it? Or maybe you want to find relevant articles to cite in your paper? Or are you an editor, and do you need to find reviewers for a particular paper? Jane can help!

Just enter the title and/or abstract of the paper in the box, and click on 'Find journals', 'Find authors' or 'Find Articles'. Jane will then compare your document to millions of documents in Medline to find the best matching journals, authors or articles.
SCImago Journal Rank This link opens in a new window
The SCImago Journal & Country Rank is a portal that includes the journals and country scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus® database (Elsevier B.V.). These indicators can be used to assess and analyze scientific domains.

This platform takes its name from the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) indicatorpdf, developed by SCImago from the widely known algorithm Google PageRank™. This indicator shows the visibility of the journals contained in the Scopus® database from 1996.

SCImago is a research group from the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), University of Granada, Extremadura, Carlos III (Madrid) and Alcalá de Henares, dedicated to information analysis, representation and retrieval by means of visualisation techniques.

As well as SJR Portal, SCImago has developed The Atlas of Science project, which proposes the creation of an information system whose major aim is to achieve a graphic representation of IberoAmerican Science Research. Such representation is conceived as a collection of interactive maps, allowing navigation functions throughout the semantic spaces formed by the maps.

Measuring Research Impact - Guide

Getting Published

Make it easy for the editors to say, “Yes!”

Comply with the rules of the journal:

Instructions to Authors in the Health Sciences
provides links to Web sites which provide instructions to authors for over 6,000 journals in the health and life sciences.

Follow conventions for the study type:

Equator Network: Guidelines for Publishing by Study Type
more... less...

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.

It is the first coordinated attempt to tackle the problems of inadequate reporting systematically and on a global scale; it advances the work done by individual groups over the last 15 years.

Create an error-free bibliography:

EndNote Basic This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Mendeley This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Mendeley is a free reference manager and academic social network.

Find Information about Journals (publisher, where indexed, etc.)

Ulrich's Online This link opens in a new window

lrichsweb.com, the Internet edition of the Ulrich's Periodical Directory, contains a quarter-million records, including academic and scholarly journals, monographic series, electronic publications, consumer and trade magazines, newsletters, newspapers, zines, and many other types of serial publications -- whether it's published regularly or irregularly, and whether it's an active, ceased or forthcoming title.
Serials Directory This link opens in a new window

Updated regularly. Provides access to the most up-to-date and accurate bibliographic information as well as current pricing structures for popular serials. It contains over 184,000 U.S. and international titles, including newspapers; historical data for an additional 20,000 titles; data from nearly 83,500 publishers worldwide, including e-mail and Internet addresses; and Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal Classifications for every entry.

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I've Written It, Now Where Do I Publish It?: Home