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

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
  • 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
  • UTMB has agreements with some publishers to provide discounted article processing fees.

NIH Public Access Policy Considerations

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). 

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 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)

Getting Published

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

Comply with the rules of the journal:

Follow conventions for the study type:

Create an error-free bibliography:

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