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Choosing a Journal
Selecting the right journal is essential to ensuring that your findings reach the desired audience.
How do I identify potential journals?
Follow these steps to find journals that would be a good fit for your manuscript:
Step 1. Browse the articles you are citing in your manuscript. If you are citing the same journal more than once, it may be worth investigating.
Step 2. Analyze your article topic with the JANE tool. Paste key words, your title, or your abstract in the text box, and you will get a list of relevant journals.
Step 3. Once you have a short list of possible journals, look them up on PubsHub to see which best fits your goals. You can see factors such as the journal’s impact factor, rejection rate, time to acceptance, and types of articles accepted. PubsHub also links to the journal’s author guidelines, where you can find more details, such as length limits.
- Find additional resources for identifying journals.
- If you’d like help, ask a librarian by emailing RML-Help@mdanderson.org.
How do I know if my journal is a reputable journal?
Is the journal listed in a major database?
- Is it a medical journal? Be sure it is listed as “Currently indexed for MEDLINE”.
- Is it an open access journal? Be sure it is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals.
If not, ask yourself these questions:
- Is the publisher promising a quick turnaround? A quick turnaround time may mean that the publisher is not thoroughly editing the manuscript or rigorously following the peer-review process.
- Did the publishers solicit a manuscript submission through email? If so, was the email clear about why they wanted a manuscript from you? Does the email have spelling or grammatical errors? Any of these things are red flags that the journal may be questionable.
- Is the publisher transparent about publication fees? There are some questionable journals who will ask for a publication fee after you have submitted your manuscript.
- Does the journal have an impact factor in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) database? Not every journal will have an impact factor, but if a journal is claiming to have one, be sure to confirm the impact factor is legitimate by searching the official JCR database.
- Are your colleagues familiar with the journal? You or your colleagues should be aware of the journal as a publication they would read, publish in or cite regularly.
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Should I choose an open access journal?
Open access (OA) journals require authors to pay an upfront fee to make the article publicly aviaalbe. When you choose an open access journal, you make your work freely and immediately available to readers.
How will I pay for the OA fee?
- Authors cover this fee through grant funding or departmental funds. The purpose of the fee is to cover the charges incurred when editing and formatting your paper.
Is paying an OA fee to a journal bad?
- No. However, there are a handful of questionable or predatory journals that will ask authors for a fee, but not provide editing or peer review services. Even though they will usually follow through with “publishing” your paper on their website, these papers will rarely end up in major databases like PubMed. This can damage the author’s reputation and affect their promotion and tenure process.
What is an impact factor and how do I find one?
Impact factors are used to measure the importance of a journal by calculating the number of times selected articles are cited within the last few years. The higher the impact factor, the more highly ranked the journal. It is one tool you can use to compare journals in a subject category. MD Anderson staff can search Journal Citation Reports to find the latest impact factors.
Does an impact factor indicate quality?
- Impact factors are useful, but they should not be the only consideration when judging quality. Not all journals are tracked in the JCR database and, as a result, do not have impact factors. New journals must wait until they have a record of citations before even being considered for inclusion. The scientific worth of an individual article has nothing to do with the impact factor of a journal.