Which journals have your colleagues, supervisors, research group or mentors recommended you read?
Which journals do they publish in?
Which journals have you found most useful when researching your topic?
Which journals fit your topic? What sort of format, style and types of articles is the journal interested in?
Information about the features below can usually be sourced on the journal's website.
Does your article fit within the topical coverage and mission of the journal?
The peer-review process is generally seen as a quality control mechanism in the scholarly publishing field. There are different levels of peer review, with double-blind peer review by multiple reviewers considered ideal. In this case the reviewers and authors are unaware of each other's identities, ensuring minimal chance of bias. Increasingly journals are opting to use open peer review, there are some variations in how this operates with the authors and peer-reviewers identities becoming known either before or after the review is undertaken. Open peer-review aims to open up discourse and communication around publications. Some databases refer to journals that use a peer review process as refereed.
In addition to the peer review information provided by the journal you may be able to use databases to verify the peer review status of the journal.
Who would you like to read your research? Is it targeted at your peers in the research community, or at a broader practitioner or public audience?
Whether a journal is included in the important databases for your field of research is another important factor when selecting journals to publish in because it can provide an indication of the esteem the journal is held in and also affects how others will find your publications.
If a journal's website claims that it is being indexed by databases and you are unable to verify this on the databases directly, it may be an indication that the journal is not reputable.
Would you like your research findings to be freely available worldwide and accessible to the broadest spectrum of readers possible? Investigate the Open Access options provided by prospective journals.
The frequency of issues and the number of articles published annually may affect rejection rates, influence turnaround times for processing articles and impact on the time taken for articles to be published.
What percentage of article submissions are rejected? A high rejection rate may suggest a journal is of high quality but reduces the likelihood of a submitted article being published in that journal.
How much time does it usually take for a submitted article to be accepted and published?
It's not usually acceptable to submit an article to more than one journal at a time so the turnaround time will impact upon the time it will take to make your findings available. But keep in mind quality journals require time for peer reviewers to read and respond to the article.
Does the journal require you to make your research dateset openly available? Journals such as Nature, PLOS etc. require authors to provide public access to the dateset that their paper is based on. Where possible, Scopus links an article's Scopus record to it's related open access dateset.
Your datasets can be made available for re-use on Research Online, ECU's Institutional Repository. Your dataset will be provided with a DOI and listed on Research Data Australia.
Some of the tools also provide a range of journal metrics allowing authors to identify highly ranked journals. Scopus or Journal Citation Reports can also be used to identify high ranking journals.
You will generally be asked to sign a publishing agreement once your article is accepted for publication. Things to look out for in the agreement:
The SPARC Author Addendum is a legal instrument that modifies the publisher’s agreement, allowing authors to keep key rights to their articles. The Author Addendum is a free resource developed by SPARC in partnership with Creative Commons.
Once your work is published, it is in the public domain. For commercially relevant work this may mean that it is no longer patentable. You should check if any valuable intellectual property in your work could be compromised by being published. For further assistance:
If your publication is an outcome of a project funded by the ARC or NHMRC, it may be affected by the funder's Open Access Policies requiring outputs to be openly accessible. Check current policies before submitting outputs for publication.