Choosing a right fit for your manuscript

Category: Education

Selecting a target journal to publish your first paper is like walking into an apparel shop and losing your way by looking at the variety around you. First, you start looking for items of well-known brands, then you check their price tags, and considering the size of your wallet you then quietly move on to the next item. The most logical decision is to select a not too expensive item with a durable material. Well, the process of deciding a journal for a young scientist is a lot similar! For established researchers choosing a journal out of their “pre-selected” journals, that is, some set journals where they have published papers for years, is the least concerned task. Being a young researcher, you are torn between being under the pressure to publish at least one paper annually or during your PhD and your (far-fetched) dream of publishing your papers only in prestigious journals. The most prestigious journals in your field (for example, Cell, Science, or Nature) are like those expensive, luxury clothing brands, which demand novelty research and require abundant data. By contrast, easily available (with lowest impact factors) or newly launched (without any impact factor) journal will question the quality of your research. Therefore, depending on your data quality (the size of your wallet), the most logical option is to short list journals with a considerable impact factor (a debatable but sadly the most accepted criterion), which offer a peer review service and charge reasonable article processing fee. Available options As mentioned earlier, an established scientist already has a list of trustworthy journals; therefore, let your supervisor judge your work, and depending on the research topic and data quality let him/her suggest some journals. Because reputed journal demand for the highest quality data and offer closed-access to published materials, a market of open access publishing has emerged recently (for example, PLoS ONE and eLife), which charge a relatively affordable article processing fee and offer open access to all published material. Market of fakers The ongoing trend of publish or perish in academia exerts tremendous pressure on young scientists that they cut corners out of desperation, which has given rise to a market of fake journals (and fake conferences), an updated list of “predatory open-access journals” can be found here. To emphasize the ugly truth of the current academic scenario, I would like you to refer to my another post on “Who’s afraid of peer review?” as a continuation of this topic. In conclusion, first, be a critic of your own work. Second, this probably will be the final topic of research during your PhD, but do some research and list out the best possible journals fit for your work by going through their open-access papers. Analyze whether your research theme and the journal’s research theme are compatible, read reviews related to the journal on forums, try to find out the peer review service of that journal, and make a final decision.