Choosing a Journal

There are many sceptical journals nowadays. So, be carefull when you want to submit your works to a journal. Else, you will regret it. There are many ways to detect the quality of the journal. To me, I use scopus, repec, and elsevier as the benchmark of the quality. If the journal is not listed in one of these three, I will not send it.

Another trick of me is by sending email. I send email to the editor and ask their opinion regarding my paper. Is it suitable topic for their journal or not? I can judge the quality of the editor by how the reply it. For example, I sent email to Cimate Research. The editor reply me vigourly. It indicates the quality of the journal is very good (even though my paper is not suitable for their journal).

You can also follow the tips from informaworld. Check it on http://journalauthors.tandf.co.uk/preparation/choosing.asp. I copy-paste their tips here… Happy researching!

Rayenda

Some questions you might wish to consider are:

• Does the journal have an international audience?
• Is the journal peer reviewed?
• Who is the editor?
• Who is on the editorial board?
• Which authors publish in the journal?
• Is the journal in the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI®) database?
• Is the journal available online?
• Is the journal published by an international association or learned society?

We publish over 1,500 quality journals in association with 340 learned societies and scholarly institutions. Our program spans subject areas including Geography, Education, Sociology, Planning, Communication, Area Studies, History, Economics, International Relations, Literature, Sport, Philosophy, Anthropology, Psychology, Politics, Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Life Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Earth Science.

580 of our journals are now listed in or have been accepted for listing in the Thomson Scientific (ISI) Citation Indexes. Over 500 of these were ranked in the 2006 Science and Social Sciences Journal Citation Reports® (JCRs®). We have 73 journals ranked in the top 10 of their JCR category, with top ranked journals including The American Journal of Bioethics, Applied Spectroscopy Reviews, Human-Computer Interaction, Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition, Critical Reviews in Clinical Laboratory Sciences, Journal of the Learning Sciences, International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, and Ethnicity & Health.

We’ve brought together tips from some of our journal editors on choosing a journal and learning from successful authors.

Advice from Professor Stephen Ball, Editor of Journal of Education Policy:
“Some people who send papers … simply send it to the wrong journal and that’s becoming increasingly the case … And it’s surprising how many people submit papers clearly never having read the journal, never opened a page of the journal or read on the website what it is the journal’s interested in. And increasingly, as the Managing Editor, I’m fielding papers at the initial stage which we would never send out for review and I write back and I say sorry, this doesn’t fit within the remit of our journal.”

“Be … tactical in terms of thinking about which journal you want to send your paper to so you don’t end up wasting your time.”

“That can be frustrating as an Editor. I feel I’m having my time wasted when people send papers to the journal which patently don’t fit in the journal at all. And they’re wasting their own time because then they have to wait for us to read the paper and look at it and send it back to them and then they have to go through it again. I imagine there are some people who spend their life sending their papers to journals that don’t want to publish them, not because they’re not good papers but because they’re just in the wrong place.”

Advice from Professor Elspeth Broady, an Editor of the Language Learning Journal:
“We are obviously looking for something that’s relevant to our readership.”

Advice from Professor John Evans, Editor of Sport, Education and Society:
“We’re looking for something that’s got something to say to the professions that are the readership of our journal.”

“The most common mistake is not to have looked at the journal, not to have appreciated, I think, what it is about.”

Advice from Professor Douglas Allford, an Editor of the Language Learning Journal:
“Also it’s a good idea to read previous issues of the [journal] so as to get a feel of what it is we publish.”

Advice from Professor Roger Slee, Editor of the International Journal of Inclusive Education:
“I guess the advice from where I sit would be that people writing for the journal ought to look back over the journal and think about what’s been contributed and the way things have been framed for the journal.”

Advice from Professor Michael Reiss, Editor of Sex Education:
“There’s no doubt that as an Editor, when you first get a submission, what you’re doing is two things: at one level you’re simply filtering so, a fairly small proportion, we’re probably only talking about twenty, twenty-five percent, do not get sent out by me for review, that’s because they fall into one of a number of categories. Sometimes they simply fall outside the scope of the journal.”

Advice from Professor Len Barton, Editor of Disability and Society:
“A most common problem of a submission is the lack of time and thought that authors have given to examining some of the back issues in the journal. Without this effort they are not able to connect to the history and ideas that have developed over the life of the journal. They are not sensitive to the history of those ideas, not that we are asking them to accept them but to be at least aware of them. We are still having articles today where there isn’t a single reference to any published paper in twenty-odd years in this journal.”

Advice from Professor David Gillborn, Editor of Race Ethnicity and Education:
“Look at past issues of the journal. See what kinds of things are published, I mean basically identify the papers that you think are the strongest papers. So everyone has certain papers that they think are amongst the key things in their field. Well what sets those papers apart? Look at how they’ve been constructed and then try and do the same.”

Advice from Professor Sue Clegg, member of the Executive Editorial Board of Teaching in Higher Education :
“When I do the first read through of papers that come in, it’s clear that I am sometimes getting things from people that haven’t read the policy statement and actually haven’t read papers, so one of the things that we added to the policy statement last time was to actually encourage people to situate themselves within the journal. So I’m afraid that the reason sometimes that papers get rejected before they go out to peer review is that they’re simply not suitable for the journal; that they are very descriptive, small-scale descriptions of what went on in their classroom, and so that actually they’re not suitable. One of the most important things that we say back to people at that stage, is ‘please go away and read the policy statement, please go away and read the journal’.”