Skip to Main Content

Strategic Publishing : How to choose a Journal

Aiming high

Publishing in high impact journals will get you a larger audience for your research, and will provide you with more opportunities to attract citations because the research is appearing on a platform that is

  1.  of quality
  2.  has wider readership and
  3.  is of importance to your field.

Choosing a Journal

There are many ways to choose a journal to publish in. You can ask your colleagues and supervisor for suggestions.

Factors to consider when selecting the right journal are:

  • Journal attributes 
  • Publishers attributes 
  • Journal acceptance rates

You can find this information via Ulrichs

The Australian Research Council has an Excellence in Research for Australia Journal List, which lists Journals that are eligible for ERA 2023 submissions. You can view the list here: ERA 2023 Journal List 

The ABDC List provides journal ranking for Business and Law journals. 

Another way to choose a Journal is via Journal Metrics. Journal metrics will allow you to make decisions on where to publish.

Visit the Journal Metrics Page for a more detailed explanation of how to use these tools.

Journal Scoping Tools

You have to choose a Journal that is the right fit for your research. Certain journals have specific fields of research, and some are multidisciplinary. Depending on who your research is aimed at, it’s best to publish in a journal that fits the scope of your research. Here are some tools to help you do that:

JANE is a program that goes through the journals on PubMed and matches your abstract via key words to find you an appropriate journal. Jane first searches for the 50 articles that are most similar to your input*. For each of these articles, a similarity score between that article and your input is calculated. The similarity scores of all the articles belonging to a certain journal or author are summed to calculate the confidence score for that journal or author. The results are ranked by confidence score. - JANE

Elsevier Journal Finders allows you to enter your title and abstract, so they can find a match. They use key word matching and field of research vocabularies to find journals that many match your work - Elsevier Journal Finder 

The Springer Journal Suggester searches through all it's Springer and BMC journals via key word search. It also allows you to compare and contrast the journals it finds very easily - Springer Journal Suggester 

If you google EndNote Manuscript Matcher, you’ll find it very easy to use. In fact if you are already an EndNote user, you should have access to Manuscript Matcher via Word. It will only work if you’ve been using EndNote for your citations however. Otherwise you can use the EndNote Online version and copy/paste your abstract. It will then give you journal suggestions based on your topic.

 

Consider Open Access

Publishing in OA Journals will increase the visibility and accessibililty of your work. Things you need to consider are: 

  • Choosing the Journal - there are many tools for you to use when choosing a journal. Visit our How to Choose a Journal page. 
  • OA models - you can view these here. For more information on publishing models you can search Journals on the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and Sherpa/ROMEO.
  • Journal Impact - publishing in a journal with high impact will ensure the success of your works. Visit our Journal Impact page to view tool that will help you decide where to publish. 
Charles Darwin University acknowledges the traditional custodians across the lands on which we live and work, and we pay our respects to Elders both past and present.
CRICOS Provider No: 00300K (NT/VIC) 03286A (NSW) RTO Provider No: 0373 Privacy StatementCopyright and DisclaimerFeedback • ABN 54 093 513 649