Here are some tips for deciding which journals are a good fit for your article.
Talk to peers or professors and ask where they have been published.
Search for scholarly articles about similar topics, and identify which journals published them.
Use a tool for looking up journals. These can include indexes like the Directory of Open Access Journals, a journal directory like Ulrich’s Web, or an AI tool like Jane BioSemantics.
Publishing model
Open Access publications make your work accessible to everyone, but may include an article processing charge. Refer to the Open Access tab of this publishing guide section for reasons to consider publishing with Open Access journals.
Subscription publications do not charge author fees, but the article will be behind a paywall.
UT offers several OA agreements that can cover some or all associated fees for open access journals.
Prestige or reputation
What have you heard about this journal?
Impact factor or other metric
An impact factor is an indicator of how important a journal is in their field. It is calculated by the number of times articles from it are cited in a year. This metric does not evaluate the quality of the citations.
Only journals in circulation for at least 3 years can receive an impact factor.
For more information on impact factor and other journal metrics, visit the Journal Metrics page. To look up the impact factors of different journals, go to the Journal Citation's Report.
Ethics
Is the journal transparent about important journal functions such as copyright policies, potential publishing fees, a commitment to a thorough peer review process?
Check whether the journal is a member of an ethical publishing group, like the Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE).
Multidimensional Journal Evaluation
by
Scientific communication depends primarily on publishing in journals. The most important indicator to determine the influence of a journal is the Impact Factor. Since this factor only measures the average number of citations per article in a certain time window, it can be argued that it does not reflect the actual value of a periodical. This book defines five dimensions, which build a framework for a multidimensional method of journal evaluation. The author is winner of the Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Scholarship 2011.
Unlimited users.
Provides an annual analysis of scholarly journals in the hard and social sciences. Attempts to show the relationship between citing and cited journals in order to determine the relative importance of journals within their subject categories. Covers about 7,000 international science, and 1,600 international social sciences journals.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Generic License.