LibGuides: Where to Publish Your Research: Identifying Potential Journals

Welcome!

This guide is designed to assist researchers in-

Identifying potential journals to publish
Exploring tools to identify specific journals
Knowing the pros and cons of open access journals
Identifying open access journals with author fees

Acceptance Rates

In general, lower journal acceptance acceptance rates are considered more prestigious.

Listed below are the few resources that include the acceptance rates of a journal. Acceptance rates are sometimes provided on publisher websites as part of the instructions to authors material. If you cannot find the acceptance rate of a journal by using the tools provided or viewing the journal's website, try contacting the editor directly. Be aware that some journals make their acceptance rates easily available, others consider this proprietary information and do not .

Cabell's Scholarly Analytics database
Referred to as "Difficulty of Acceptance." A good resource for finding acceptance rates and other pertinent information about journals in various disciplines.
Does not cover every discipline. Cabell's now includes a "blacklist" of predatory publishers and publications.

Selecting Journals- A Short Video

Think. Check. Submit. is a campaign endorsed by many scholarly organizations worldwide to help researchers identify trusted journals for their research. It is a simple checklist researchers can use to assess the credentials of a journal or publisher.

Which Journal to publish?

Try searching for the topic of your article in a relevant database to see where related articles in your field have been published.

In addition, you may also consider using the following databases and tools. This list isn't exhaustive but does provide some good starting points.

Here are some directories of journals and some publisher specific tools for locating journals-

Directory of Nursing Journals
List of nursing journals produced by the International Academy of Nursing Editors (INANE).
Elsevier Journal Finder
Search for an Elsevier journal by name or use the Elsevier Journal Finder by entering your abstract to find journals best suited for your research.
Includes acceptance rates
Journal/Author Name Estimator (JANE)
JANE matches your title, abstract, or keywords to millions of documents in MEDLINE to help determine the best journals for your research.
JournalGuide
JournalGuide aims to bring all sources of data together in one place to give authors a simple way to choose the best journal for your research.
Springer Journal Selector
Enter your abstract or article description to find Springer journals best suited for your research.
Includes acceptance rates.
Ulrichsweb
Use Ulrichsweb to find data on over 250,000 publications worldwide. It includes reviews, abstracting and indexing information, email addresses, URLs, and even includes titles which have ceased publication.
WoS Manuscript Matcher
Find journals where your research is most likely to be accepted based on an analysis of tens of millions of citation connections in Web of Science Core Collection using Manuscript Matcher.

Journal metrics

Journal metrics, such as Impact Factor, CiteScore, SJR and SNIP can help inform your decision on where to publish.The best known international indicator is the Impact Factor, which is based on the average number of citations a journal has received over a two year period. The Impact factor is available from Journal Citation Reports (JCR), produced by Clarivate Analytics. A guide to using JCR to find impact factors, quartile and percentile rankings is available here.Other journal indictors are available from Scopus

CiteScore: this is the closest to the Impact Factor and is based on the average number of citations a journal has received over a three year period.
SJR (SCImago Journal Rank): a normalised indicator. SJR is weighted by the prestige of a journal.
SNIP (Source Normalised Impact per Paper): a normalised indicator. SNIP measures a source's contextual citation impact by weighting citations based on the total number of citations in a subject field.