Publication planning

Information to find from the journal/s of choice

Journals provide useful information on their websites that you can use when deciding on the usefulness of said journal in your publication strategy.

• Requirements of the journal
  • types of articles accepted, length of articles, referencing styles, submission processes.
• Relevant to the scope
  • always remember to read the scope and aims of the journal as your paper needs to aligned to the journal's scope.
• Acceptance/Rejection rates
  • some journals share the acceptance/rejection rate on the "information for author" pages
  • the following site may be useful for those in the sciences
    • SciRev provides researchers the opportunity to share their experiences with the review process of journals.
• Turn-around time
  • an indication of the average turn-around time from submission to publication is listed for open access journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
  • check the author instructions of a journal's web page or look at some of the published papers, submission and publication times are sometimes included
• We recommend keeping these details in a spreadsheet, listing all the requirements for each journal as this can become a reference point, remember to include those that are not suitable as well. A sample spreadsheet can be found on this page.
• Use Scopus Sources or SCImago to determine the quartile ranking of the journals. Metrics such as the Source Normalised Impact per Paper (SNIP) may help determine the usefulness of your chosen journals.