Medicine

Here are some tips for deciding which journals are a good fit for your article.

Starting your search for a journal:

• 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. 

What do I look for in a journal?

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).