Selecting a Journal for Publication

How Do I Decide Which Jounal to Submit a Manuscript to?

Before deciding upon a journal, you should ask yourself some questions.  What audience am I writing to?  Am I addressing generalists or specialists?  Do I want to address a worldwide audience or perhaps only an American or European audience.  Am I addressing primarily practicing providers, teachers, residents or all of these groups?  The answers to these questions will significantly narrow the list of journals you will want to consider.

It is best to decide which journal you are targeting before you start to write your manuscript.  Take some time to pick an appropraite journal. Do your research.  Do a search on a Google using the term journal and your main content area or field.  Most manuscripts could fit in a number of different categories so search on all of them.  For each journal, try to figure out the following:

1.  Is the Journal Open Access?   Open access journals are journals that do not charge readers a subscription fee for reading the article.  Open access journals often charge the author a publication fee sometimes around $1,000, but then they do not restrict access to your manuscript and it can be read by anyone anywhere who has web access.  Some open access journals are only web based and other have a paper version that they charge for as well.  To find open access journal search on Google using the search terms "journal open access" and your topic or field.

Some Family Medicine Journals that are open access:

3.  Citation Index.  Good journals are either journals that are widely read or journals that increase your chances of getting cited by other researchers in future articles.  Many journals have a "citation index" that tells you how many times on average articles that are published in the journal are subsequently cited.  Official citation indexes are calculated by a commercial product called Thompson Scientific Web of Science for which you need a password or institutional access. Unofficial citation indexes are sometimes posted on newer journal web sites if they are not yet listed by Thompson Scientific.  A few journals (New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, JAMA) have citation indexes > 10.  Good journals have citation indexes between 2 and 6.  Most journals have citation indexes that are 1 or less.  Remember that as long as your article is published in an open access journal and indexed on medline, anyone searching the web can find it even if it is an obscure journal.  For a more detailed discussion of citation indexes and how they impact Family Medicine in particular see http://www.jabfm.org/cgi/reprint/19/6/633.pdf.

4.  Peer Review -  Journals that are peer reviewed only accept submitted articles after they have been given a favorable review by experts.  Manuscripts published in peer reviewed journals count more heavily toward promotion and often, manuscripts published in non-peer reviewed journals do not count at all toward promotion.  If you need peer reviewed publications for promotion,  only submit to peer reviewed journals. 

5. Continue the conversation - Research articles can be seen as conversations between researchers.  Who did you cite in your bibliography?  Where did they publish their papers?  Where is this conversation taking place?  The journals you cite may welcome your contribution to the conversation about your topic.

6.  Find similar articles - Once you have selected a journal,  look for articles that have been published in it that are similar to the article you are planning to write.  Print them out and use them for a model.  If there are not journal articles that are even close to what your are planning, consider finding another journal.

7.  Follow the Instructions for Authors - Find the journals instructions for authors page, print it out and follow it carefully.  If you do not comply with the instructions for authors, you decrease  your chances of getting published.