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Choose the Right Journal to Publish

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Choose the Right Journal to Publish

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This guide will help you determine whether a journal is peer-reviewed, and to identify the most credible and suitable journals for publishing your research.

Here you will find practical methods, tools, and trusted sources to evaluate the most suitable journals for your subject area and learn how to avoid predatory publishing, ensuring that your work is published in a legitimate, high-quality academic journal.

Useful Links

1. Verify the peer review status of journals

Start your search with Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory (available on-campus only with LAN connection, except for the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine) to determine the peer review status of journals, identify which databases include the journal (e.g. Scopus or Web of Science), and find publisher information as well as the journal’s frequency.

Ulrich is the authoritative source of bibliographic information and publisher details on academic and scholarly journals, open-access publications, peer-reviewed titles, popular magazines, newspapers, newsletters, and more. It covers all subject areas and includes publications worldwide, that are published regularly or irregularly, as well as those that are circulated free of charge or by paid subscription.

2. Identify potential journals for publishing

The following tools will help you to match your work to potential journals in your field. You will receive a list of potential journals by searching for titles or content-based searches. You can then use scientific evaluation tools to select the journals that are right for you.

Note: no journal finder will include every single journal.

  • Journal Finder (Beta) will display Wiley’s journals that might be relevant to your research. To get a list of potential journals, simply search by the title and/or content of your work.
  • Journal Suggester Beta (Taylor & Francis) matches your manuscript to the most suitable journal. The tool will also help in comparing relevant journals.
  • Publication Recommender (IEEE) searches within 190+ periodicals and 1800+ conferences, comparing critical points such as Impact Factor and Submission-To-Publication Time. Get all the key data about IEEE’s publications at a glance and download the search results.
  • Journal Suggester (SPRINGER) will help you find relevant journals based on your work details. Use the search tool to view the most suitable journals for your research.
  • Journal Finder (powered by the Elsevier Fingerprint Engine™) helps you find journals that are best suited for publishing your scientific article. Journal Finder uses smart search technology and field-of-research specific vocabularies to match your paper to scientific journals. More on how it works.
  • The Master Journal List will help you find the right journal for your needs across multiple indices hosted on the Web of Science platform. In addition to the Web of Science Core Collection, you can search across the following specialty collections: Biological Abstracts, BIOSIS Previews, Zoological Record, Current Contents Connect and the Chemical Information products.
    Search filters enable users to quickly navigate 24,000+ journals across 254 subject disciplines. Journal profile pages provide a more comprehensive view of a journal, with information on journal metrics, peer review details, open access information, and more.

3. Evaluate the relative importance of the journal

Once you have listed one or more possible journals, the next step is to rank your choice in comparison to other journals within the same or similar disciplines.

Journal metrics are a proxy measure used to evaluate the relative importance of a journal and identify major journals within a subject area.

The most commonly used metrics are: Journal Impact Factor (Clarivate Analytics), CiteScore, SJR and SNIP (Scopus), Google Scholar Metrics.

The Journal Impact Factor is the average number of times articles from the journal (published in the past two years) have been cited in the JCR year.

The calculation for the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is as follows:

Where:

  • Citations in Year X refers to the number of citations in a particular year (e.g., Year X) to articles published in the two previous years (X-1 and X-2).
  • Total Number of Articles Published in Years X-1 and X-2 refers to the total number of articles published by the journal during those two years.

Example:

So, the Journal Impact Factor for 2022 would be 5.88.

More about JIF 

Journal Citation Reports (JCR) is the only official database that calculates the Impact factor for academic journals.

Title Suppressions in JCR:

Journals Suppressed from 2023 JCR Data (2024 release)

Not all journals have Impact Factors:

  • Citation data only exists for the records indexed by JCR.
  • There is a limited number of small-sized journals.
  • Limited number of journals in non-English languages.
  • Very few Open Access journals.
  • New journals do not have Journal Impact Factors.
Journal Impact Factors may vary between different disciplines:
  • Disciplines that use more references per paper are expected to increase the Impact Factor of the journal.
  • The same journal may be ranked differently depending on the category being reviewed.
Impact factor depends on the journal’s size:
  • Large and small journals are compared equally *Smaller or more specialized journals will tend to have smaller Impact Factors.
The Impact Factor depends only on the articles that are cited within two years after publication.
 
Self-citation can distort low journal Impact Factors.
 
Journals with a large proportion of non-citable items (such as editorials) can have lower journal Impact Factors. Reviewed articles are cited more often and can impact the results. 

Journal Citation Reports (JCR) contains all the data required to understand the components that index the value and impact of each journal. JCR provides the following metrics: 

  • Impact Factor 
  • 5-year Impact Factor –  is the average number of times articles from the journal published in the past five years have been cited in the last five years (citations to articles from the most recent five years, divided by the total number of articles from the most recent five years)
  • Immediacy Index – is the average number of times articles from the journal published in the current year have been cited in the current year (citations to articles from the current year, divided by the total number of articles from the current year)
  • Eigenfactor – similar to the 5-Year Journal Impact Factor, but weeds out journal self-citations.
  • Article Influence – the Eigenfactor score divided by the number of articles published in the journal.

SCImago Journal & Country Rank (SJR) –  is a publicly available tool that includes the journals and country scientific indicators based on the data in Scopus. These indicators can be used to assess and analyze scientific domains. Journals can be compared or analyzed separately. SJR provides the following metrics:

  • SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) – measures the scientific influence of scholarly journals that account for both the number of citations received by a journal and the importance or prestige of the journals where the citations come from. This value is calculated by dividing the number of citations received by the journal in the given year from primary items to primary items published in the three previous years by the number of primary items published on the journal in the three previous years. See detailed description of SJR (PDF).
  • H-Index – shows the journal’s number of articles (h) that received at least h citations. It quantifies both journal scientific productivity and scientific impact and it is also applicable to scientists, countries, etc. (see H-index wikipedia definition)

Scopus – is the largest abstract and citation database for peer-reviewed literature. It measures citation impact for journals, book series, conference proceedings and trade journals. Scopus provides the following metrics: 

  • CiteScore – the average citations per document that a title receives over a three-year period. CiteScore is the number of citations for a journal in one year to documents published in the three previous years, divided by the number of documents indexed in Scopus published in those same three years.
  • SCImago Journal Rank (SJR)
  • Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) – measures citations based on the number of citations in an academic field. If there are fewer citations per total in the specific research field, then every citation is considered more valuable.

Google Scholar Metric provides an easy way to quickly gauge the visibility and influence of recent articles in scholarly publications and provides the following metrics:

  • h5-index is based on the articles published by a journal over 5 calendar years. h is the largest number of articles that have each been cited h times. A journal with an h5-index of 43 has published, within a 5-year period, 43 articles that each have 43 or more citations.
  • h5-median is the median number of citations for the articles that make up its h5-index. The h index expresses the journal’s number of articles (h) that have received at least h citations. It quantifies both journal scientific productivity and scientific impact and it is also applicable to scientists, countries, etc. (see H-index Wikipedia definition).

MathSciNet – is the leading mathematics indexing and abstracting database that incorporates the content of the American Mathematical Society’s Mathematical Reviews. 
The ‘Journals tab’ provides the ability to search for publications by name or ISSN. The results link to journal profiles that provide information about the publisher, previous journal names, dates of publication, and how it is indexed in MathSciNet. You will also find links to issues, articles and citation data.
The ‘Citations’ tab will search citation information for authors, journals, subject areas, and years.
There are also top 10 lists of the most cited journals by year.

4. Avoid predatory open-access journals and publishers

Open-access journals allow authors to pay once the article has been peer-reviewed and accepted. 

This model of publishing opens an opportunity for scammers to create predatory journals.

The same model is used for predatory conferences.

Visit the Technion libraries Author guide on how to publish an Open Access article

Learn more about Open Access Journal Quality Indicators

The most recent definition of predatory journals and publishers was published in December 2019 in Nature:

“Predatory journals and publishers are entities that prioritize self-interest at the expense of scholarship and are characterized by false or misleading information, deviation from best editorial and publication practices, a lack of transparency, and/or the use of aggressive and indiscriminate solicitation practices.”

Grudniewicz, A., Moher, D., Cobey, K. D., Bryson, G. L., Cukier, S., Allen, K., … Lalu, M. M. (2019, December 12). Predatory journals: no definition, no defence. Nature, Vol. 576, pp. 210–212. 

Cabells – Scholary Analytics – analyzes thousands of open-access journals according to more than 60 suspicious behaviors in academic publishing. The database is an essential tool for writers and readers to prevent their engagement with predatory open-access journals and publishers. Check if the journal appears in Cabells ‘blacklist’: if it does, do not publish in it and do not cite from it.

Check for membership in well reputed Open Access directories and associations:

How to: Instructions and Guides

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