Choosing an Appropriate Journal

Christopher L. Pallas, PhD

Professor of Political Science and CETL Faculty Fellow for Graduate Student Support

If you have your sights set on a research career – whether as an academic or in a non-academic field – publications can play a key role in enhancing your marketability by demonstrating your capacity to conduct novel, robust research.

One of the more challenging aspects of publishing journal articles is deciding where to submit your work. Journals have proliferated such that there is a home now for almost every piece of reasonable quality. With so many options, you may be unsure how to choose the best one and avoid scam journals and low-quality venues. Conversely, you may only be familiar with the very best-known journals in your discipline, with their towering reputations and low acceptance rates. You may have even gotten rejections from those journals and be unsure where to go next.

In this post, we will discuss how to develop a list of potential journals and choose among them to maximize the professional benefits of your work.

Finding Appropriate Venues

Most journals publish articles in a single discipline or area of research, such as political science, public health, or African studies. That area of research can be broad or quite narrow and specific. Some journals also have clear preferences for the types of data used by authors: some publish only empirical studies (i.e., no theory or review pieces) while others embrace theory-oriented work. Some journals have preferences for qualitative or quantitative approaches or for policy analysis. Others may favor a particular theoretical perspective, such as critical theory or feminist theory. Because of these variations, it is important that you identify the journals that are most likely to be interested in your work. You will want to find as many potential choices as possible, ideally ten or more, since not all will prove to be good options and because you will want to have fallback journals in case your work is not accepted in your preferred venues.

You can begin building a list by taking the following steps:

1. Note which journals you are reading and citing yourself. Look for journals that appear repeatedly in the references list of your manuscripts or have titles that reflect compatibility with your research area or approach.
2. Identify where colleagues, advisors, or well-known scholars in your field are publishing. You can ask colleagues or advisors for recommendations, and you can peruse others’ CVs online or plug their names into a search engine like Google Scholar to see where they have been placing their work.
3.  Look at journal listings in your field. Many disciplines have rankings of publications, produced by sources like SCImago, Clarivate, or Google Scholar. These may work well if your work is of broad interest to people in your discipline. If you are working in a more niche subfield, you may find blog posts offering unofficial rankings. Scholars also sometimes publish articles or reports that rank journals in their field or specialty by their reputation or impact. You should search Google Scholar or your library’s offerings to see if there are any such articles in your field. These lists may alert you to options you had not previously considered.

Once you have assembled a list of journals, access the website for each journal and find its aims and scope. This brief description of the journal’s focus should tell you if your work is suitable. If you are unsure, you can also look at the tables of contents from the last several issues to see if there has been work published that has questions, data, methods, or theory similar to your own. Eliminate any journals that seem unlikely to be interested in your work. Also eliminate any journals that are of suspect quality.

Ranking Your Options

Once you have a list of at least 8-10 journals that are suitable for your work, it is time to rank order them. Recognize that maximizing the professional benefit of your publication requires that you seek to place your work in the best possible journal, even if that means a higher likelihood of rejection. Successful scholars often submit every piece to a top-tier journal and then, if necessary, bounce down the ladder of options until their piece finds the best possible home.

Which journals are best, however, depends on your goals. For example, major journal rankings like those created by Google, SCImago, and Clarivate group journals in general categories, such as political science or sociology. The top journals on these lists are often recognized by everyone in a discipline, regardless of their specialty. If your goal is publishing in a journal that will be respected by many others in your discipline (e.g., because you are seeking an academic post), a top-ranked generalist journal may be your best option. However, if you are seeking to boost your reputation among specialists in your particular subfield (e.g., because you are seeking a practitioner post), publishing in a specialist journal may help signal your subject matter expertise and distinguish you from candidates with a more academic bent.

In general, I suggest you consider the following criteria:

1. Journal audience. You want to pick a journal that is recognized and valued by your prospective or current employers. There is little value in publishing in an elite journal if you have to spend time during an interview explaining to your audience why it is elite. You can learn about journal reputation through discussions with mentors, advisors, and colleagues. You can also look at the CVs of current employees in your subfield to get a sense of important venues or you can look at the institutional affiliations of the authors who have published in the last few issues of a journal to get a sense of its audience.
2. Impact factor or ranking. Journals with a higher impact factor or ranking (if they appear on a ranked list) are generally more prestigious than those with lower impact factors or rankings. Publications in these top-tier journals may catch the eye of prospective employers and may be more likely to be cited. Note that what constitutes a high impact factor will vary by discipline. Even if you are focusing on journals that do not appear on a ranked list, you can examine the rankings in a similar discipline to get a sense of the average impact factor for a top-tier journal, mid-tier journal, etc.
3. Policy impact or public influence. Some journals are important because they are widely read by policy makers or implementers. These can be especially important venues for applied research. Look for journals with editorial boards with high-level practitioners, rather than just academics. A link to the editorial board is usually available on the journal’s website. Some journals also use new measures like PlumX Metrics and Altmetric that capture things like the social media footprint and non-academic usage of articles published in the journal.

Most journals will do well according to one or two criteria, but few will excel in all three areas. The things that make a highly ranked academic journal interesting to tenure-track faculty (e.g., diverse articles and sophisticated theory) may make it less useful to practitioners, and vice versa. Make notes on each journal and develop a long-term plan to make your research visible and available to all of the populations you want to reach as you build your portfolio of publications.

Preparing work for publication is often a stressful experience, even for established academics. Having a long list of possible journals can help make it less stressful. Knowing your target journal can help you decide how to frame your arguments or even how to format your text. Even more importantly, a long list can help you face the fear of rejection, knowing that there are many places where your work fits and where it might find favor with the editors and reviewers.

 

Portions of this text are adapted from Doctoral Student Skills: Using Your Comparative Advantage to Succeed in Grad School and Prepare for the Job Market (Routledge 2023).