There are over 1700 psychology journals indexed in Scopus, more than 90 published by the American Psychological Association, and many more beyond major indexing databases. Given this, the process of figuring out what journal you want to submit your months (or years) of hard work to can be grueling. In order to get started with at least narrowing down to a dozen good journals, here are a few factors you should consider. After this, I also share my method of prioritizing some journals over the other.
1. Aim and Scope of the Journal
A mismatch between the paper and the aim and scope of the journal is the single strongest indicator that the paper will be desk-rejected. This is therefore the first and topmost factor that you should be considering. ‘Aim and Scope’ provide you with information related to the journal’s main research areas or topics, the methodologies it would consider or not consider, and sometimes even who the main readership of the journal is. For example, some journals explicitly state that they do not accept reviews or that they only accept articles by invitation. How much your manuscript overlaps with the Aim and Scope is also something that is written in the Cover Letter to the editors when you submit your manuscript (because you’re trying to convince them how relevant your study is to the journal’s focus).
2. Recently Published Articles
Have a look at the most recently released issues of the journal, going back to two years. This will give you a good idea of the kind of papers, topics, and methodologies the journal publishes and you can check if it resembles your manuscript. Recent content reveals the journal’s editorial preferences more accurately than a broad aims-and-scope statement alone. Sometimes looking at the most recent research in the area can also give you a good idea of what you can work on in the future to submit to that particular journal.
3. Impact factor and CiteScore
This parameter is related less to avoiding rejection and more to submitting your work to a journal which is decently cited. Impact Factor (published annually by Clarivate) and CiteScore (given by Elsevier through Scopus) give a quick indication of a journal’s citation visibility and influence. CiteScore uses a four-year citation window, while Impact Factor uses citations for articles published in the last two years. If you have several good journals which fit with your manuscript, you can quickly have a look at these parameters to decide which one is better (higher is better). However, don’t use them as the main selection criteria; a high score does not mean the journal suits your research.
Journal Metrics for ‘New Media & Society’. ‘JCR’ year here refers to Journal Citation Reports year or the calendar year of the citation data being evaluated.
4. Journal reputation: Scopus-listed and Peer-reviewed
A journal’s reputation is strengthened when it is peer-reviewed and listed in Scopus or Web of Science. Peer review means that subject experts evaluate manuscripts before publication. The journal that you should be targeting should also definitely be Scopus-listed. You should be confirming the indexing of the journal directly in the relevant databases. Go to Scopus Sources or Web of Science directly to check if the journal is still indexed in the current year. Indexing affects whether the article can be found and whether it is counted by universities for points in the Academic Performance Indicator or API system. Absolutely make sure that your journal is not a clone journal. Clone journals are fraudulent websites which impersonate real academic journals. They copy its name, ISSN, and logo, and ask researchers to submit manuscripts and pay fake publication fees.
UGC-CARE has made a list of cloned or fake journals which are not considered for any academic purpose. Of course, the list doesn’t include all predatory journal, but it does exemplify how clone journals mimic actual journals, in names and in website links.
5. Practical Feasibility
No matter how well the fit with the journal, submitting to it could still be impractical if the journal guidelines state that you need to drastically shorten your manuscript (e.g., from 10,000 words to 5,000 words), or if the publication fee is unaffordable, or if you need a quick publication and the journal takes an average of a year before publication.
The Process of Prioritizing Some Journals over Others
The process of submission and manuscript publication unfortunately also involves a lot of rejections. After each rejection you have to once again find a good journal and once again submit to it, which can all get a little exhausting. My approach to this is in the form of a table; organize journals in order of how desirable they are for your topic, keeping those that best fit (in terms of aims and scope), with the highest impact factor on top. Submit to the topmost journal. If you get rejected, submit to the next journal. If you get rejected again, submit to the next journal and so on.
As you go down this list, journals have comparatively less Impact Factor and may even have comparatively less fit. Below you will see a list of journals highly relevant to my research. I have also taken into consideration other factors like how long the journal takes before giving me some sort of first decision on my manuscript, whether it is desk rejection or being forwarded to peer reviewers (“Days to first decision”). I also consider word count as I generally tend to write qualitative-focused long papers, so if I find a journal where an original article is limited to 3000 words, that's a no from me, at least initially. If you are not using a reference manager and are manually converting references to different reference styles, it is probably better to first consider journals having the same style.
This is a list of journals related to my area of research which focuses on online communities and socializing
You can add other factors in this table such as- does it have double blind peer-review? Or, does it have a subscription model or does it charge a hefty Article-Processing-Charge (APC) for publishing? However, since you are starting out in the field and (more like than not) don’t have funding to support any kind of APC, it is best to only keep journals in the list which work on subscription model / hybrid model and which are double-blind.
Different journal models: Journals use different publishing models that determine who can access an article and who pays for it. These models also shape whether authors need to pay an Article processing charge (APC), a publication fee used to make an article open access, i.e., accessible to anyone who goes to the journal website. An APC does not indicate journal quality; it is simply a fee that may be charged to make an article open access. Other journals don’t charge APC- instead of the author, the reader pays the fees. Here is a brief of different publishing models:
Subscription: Readers or libraries pay to access articles; authors usually publish without an APC, and the article is paywalled. Hence, there are lower citations over time but the authors don’t have to pay to publish.
Full open access / APC: Every article is freely available to readers; authors, funders, or institutions usually pay an APC after acceptance. It often yields higher citations over time, but author / funders pay to publish.
Hybrid: The journal has both paywalled and open-access articles; the author can pay an APC to make their article open access OR they can not pay and the reader/reader’s institute pays to access it.
Example of a Sage Journal presenting Subscription model
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