Choosing your journal
Choosing the correct journal is a key part of effective academic publishing. Getting it wrong can seriously affect the impact of your research, and usually happens in one of two ways: either by failing to reach the right audience for your topic, or by publishing in journals that lack credibility.
Discovering relevant journals
There are a number of websites you can use to discover suitable journals for your article. Most of the major academic publishers provide this service for their own journals (for example, Wiley, Elsevier, and Springer), and there are also independent services such as Edanz Journal Selector or JournalGuide which will give you suggestions for multiple publishers at the same time. Remember to consider journal quality as well, for example by using the thinkchecksubmit.org checklist (see below).
thinkchecksubmit.org
The number of academic journals is growing, and not all of them are trusted, credible platforms for your research. ‘Predatory’ or deceptive publishers exist which will publish articles, usually for a fee, without the standard peer review and editorial services provided by reputable academic publishers. If you’re not sure about the quality of a journal, the Library recommends the thinkchecksubmit.org checklist for assessing journal reputation. This is a simple, seven-point checklist that will guide you through the key issues to consider when choosing a journal: for example, have you or your colleagues heard of it? Can you find articles from it in common indexing services such as Scopus or JSTOR?
Checking journal use
Information on journal usage can help you work out where to publish to reach your intended audience. Many indexing services provide this information via metrics such as Journal Impact Factor (Web of Science) or CiteScore (Scopus), which rank journals within a subject area based on the number of citations received and thus give an indication of the likely attention your paper would receive if published in the same journal. Note that these types of rankings look at journal popularity, not quality, so be sure to consider the overall reputation and subject scope as well.
You can also check the proportion of different types of articles that are published in your preferred journals - reviews, letters, and so on - to help you target your work to the titles most likely to publish that type.
For more information on journal use metrics see http://www.bristol.ac.uk/staff/researchers/metrics/.