Library Research Guides: Scholarly Communications: Find a Journal for Your Manuscript

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Tools for Journal Selection

These tools allow you to enter keywords or the full title and abstract of your manuscript and match to relevant journals.

Scholarly Publishing Information Hub (SPI-Hub™)
A decision support journal identification & evaluation tool for prospective authors, created by the Center for Knowledge Management at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. (This is the only tool listed that also includes a search for data repositories.)
Journal/Author Name Estimator (JANE)
Match your title, abstract or keyword with millions of journal documents.
Edanz Journal Selector
Enter your abstract or keywords to search over 28,000 journals with published relevant papers.
Elsevier Journal Finder
Match the abstract of your article to an Elsevier journal. Filter your preferred criteria such as open access options, impact factor, review time, acceptance rate and production time.

Find Journal Information

The journal homepage is going to be the most important source for finding author guidelines and other submission information for authors.

Use these resources to verify claims made on the journal website, and to find indexing, bibliometrics and other details about journal publications.

Sherpa Romeo
Sherpa Romeo is an online resource that aggregates and analyses publisher open access policies from around the world and provides summaries of publisher copyright and open access archiving policies on a journal-by-journal basis.

Journal Citation Reports This link opens in a new window
Resource that allows you to evaluate and compare journals using citation data drawn from over 11,000 scholarly and technical journals from more than 3,300 publishers in over 80 countries and includes all areas of science, medicine, technology, and social sciences. Provides most frequently cited journals in a field, highest impact journals in a field, largest journals in a field, five year impact factor, and Eigenfactor.

Scimago Journal and Country Rank
The SCImago Journal & Country Rank is a publicly available portal that includes the journals and country scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus® database (Elsevier B.V.).
NLM Catalog: Journals referenced in the NCBI Databases
Find out if a journal of interest is indexed in MEDLINE and/or PubMed Central (i.e. is the journal currently discoverable in PubMed?) plus more information about the journal including frequency, alternative titles, and link to the journal homepage. You can also search PubMed for articles from the journal from within the catalog.
Directory of Open Access Journals
DOAJ is a unique and extensive index of diverse open access journals from around the world, driven by a growing community, committed to ensuring quality content is freely available online for everyone. DOAJ's mission is to increase the visibility, accessibility, reputation, usage and impact of quality, peer-reviewed, open access scholarly research journals globally, regardless of discipline, geography or language.
Beall's List of Potential Predatory Journals and Publishers
An archived version of the Beall’s list – a list of potential predatory publishers created by a librarian Jeffrey Beall. The list can provide useful insight into the history of a journal's publishing practices, but each journal should be individually vetted by you the reader or author. The list is somewhat subjective, not comprehensive, and is provided for your consideration only.

Questions to Ask When Selecting a Journal

Which journals do you or your mentor/colleagues use?

Journals that you or your colleagues read and/or cite
Journals published by your professional organization
Journals that are highly recommended for your area of research

Who is your desired audience?

If limited to a select area of research, select a journal with a narrow focus versus a multidisciplinary one
If international, select a journal with an international focus
Where is the journal indexed? Will your manuscript be discoverable to your target audience in relevant databases such as PubMed?

Are you required to comply with public access mandates for sharing of publications and/or data?

Research funded by organizations such as NIH, CDC, and NSF are required to comply with public access policies.
Check the information for authors section of the journal website or the Copyright Transfer Agreement form to confirm the journal allows authors to comply with public access mandates.
See our guide to open access for more information about public access.

Is the journal subscription, open access, or hybrid?

For a subscription journal, is there an option to publish your work open access?
Many open access and hybrid journals charge author fees for making the work open access.
If publishing open access, is there an author processing fee upon acceptance of your work?
How transparent is the journal in disclosing fees (or lackthereof) associated with open access?
Does the author retain copyright?
See our guide to open access for more information about open access.

What is the quality of the peer review process?

Does the journal provide clear and transparent information about the peer review process?
Is the review process described on the journal website?
Are the reviewers qualified to critique your research?
How are revisions handled?

Do you have a specific manuscript type in mind?

Some journals publish specific types of articles and may not be appropriate for your research.

Source: http://beckerguides.wustl.edu/selectingjournal

Predatory Journals

Predatory publishing refers a pay-to-publish model with low academic standards. Predatory journals aggressively solicit authors to submit articles with the promise of speedy publication, for a fee. Predatory journals by definition have little to no peer review (very high to 100% acceptance rates) and generally are not in keeping with the standards of ethical publishing.

For authors, publishing in these low quality journals can be a poor outlet for quality work and financially exploitative. For the scientific community, they muddy the waters of legitimacy as these non-peer reviewed journals are increasingly cited.

Features of predatory journals:

Little to no peer review. On the journal's homepage, the peer review process may be fabricated or not stated.
Pay-to-publish. The journal charges a fee for publication prior to "peer review" or without peer review. (Note: many legitimate journals charge author processing fees. However, these should never be charged or paid prior to peer-review/acceptance of the article after rigorous peer review.)
The journal's website is contains typos, misspellings, and grammatical errors.
The journal's website misrepresents editorial staff and/or provides little to no contact information.
The journal's website falsifies indexing status or Impact Factor/Citation Score.
The journal is not indexed or discoverable in recognized scholarly databases such as PubMed or Web of Science.
The journal may be associated with an ISSN and/or not grant permanent identifiers to articles (such as DOIs) or promise long-term electronic archiving of the article.