Selecting a Target Journal

It is always a tough question that how to select a target journal? These days, as number of researchers has increased all over the world, the competition for publishing has increased a lot. The journals have a limited space for published articles against the submitted articles. Resultantly, this competition has led to a higher degree of rejection rate. The rejection of any submitted manuscript could be of several types however, the desk rejection is the most common one. Desk rejection means that the submitted article is rejected straight away by the Editor either due to out of scope, lack of novelty or manuscript language.  Out of these reasons for desk rejection, out of scope is very common. Therefore, it is also the prime duty of researchers to select an appropriate target journal for their manuscript. Each researcher should know the basic selection criteria for any target journal.

Type of journal

The journals can be categorized as field journals, subject journals, and specific journals for example, Pakistan Journal of Zoology, Journal of Microbiology, and Environmental Microbiology. It is always tricky to select which category of journal for your prepared manuscript. I would rather suggest applying quality criteria vs requirement of publishing. To use quality criteria, you should know the weight of your manuscript (research). If you feel that the quality of your research is quite good then I would suggest to select a specific journal i.e. Industrial Biotechnology, but if you are doubtful and need acceptance then broader scope field journals i.e. Pakistan Journal of Zoology will be a good option because the subject specific journals receive a number of very targeted manuscripts and they only prefer high quality manuscripts. On the other hand, broad field journals i.e. Pakistan Journal of Zoology, receive quite diverse manuscripts along the breadth of the scope of journal. Therefore, the number of submitted manuscripts in each sub-disciplines (Environmental Microbiology) will not be that high as compared with journal “Environmental Microbiology”. Thus, selecting the right type of journal also plays a good role in the acceptance of your manuscript.

Scope of journal

The most important element of a target journal is its scope. The scope actually defines the boundary of any journal. We can get a rough idea of a journal’s scope from its title. Considering the example of Bioresource Technology, the scope of a journal usually tells about topics of interest (Biofuels: liquid and gaseous biofuels production, modeling and economics; Bioprocesses and bioproducts: biocatalysis and fermentations; Biomass and feedstocks utilization: bioconversion of agro-industrial residues; Environmental protection: biological waste treatment; Thermochemical conversion of biomass: combustion, pyrolysis, gasification, catalysis), types of manuscripts (original articles, review articles, case studies and short communications), and topics not preferred at all (crop cultivation, breeding and agronomy, plant extracts and enzymes, composites,  marine organisms (except microorganisms and algae for bioprocesses), soil and air pollution, and performance of fuel combustion in engines.). Each researcher should carefully go through the scope of target journal that whether his/her manuscript clearly falls in the scope of that journal. Any wrong decision will only lead to desk rejection and wastage of time. Both of these outcomes will put extra pressure on the researcher.

Processing time

The processing time of a submitted manuscript is another critical parameter to select a target journal. This parameter becomes very important for PhD scholars for the submission of their thesis. They are normally required to submit one published research paper along with their thesis or so. Thus, any PhD scholar cannot afford to select a journal that takes several months to publish his research paper. So, researchers should pay attention to the processing time of any target journal. There are three different time frames normally journals use; Editorial review time, review time, revision review (acceptance) time and published online. We can get the information about this time processing from the previously published papers of target journal. One of research paper published in Bioresource Technology (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960852416306836) shows this timeline; Received 3 March 2016, Revised 12 May 2016, Accepted 13 May 2016, Available online 14 May 2016. This timeline reveals that Bioresource Technology will take 2.5 months. However, this timeline is for one research paper but we need to know average processing time. For that, researchers can check the timelines of 4-5 published papers.

Impact factor vs impact

There is a running debate on impact factor vs impact approach for selecting a target journal. It is true that impact factor does not guarantee the publication of a good research papers. It has been noticed that there are several journals which do not possess high impact factor but they have earned a good prestige within the scientific community. Although the journals such as Chemosphere, Biochemical Engineering Journal, Process Biochemistry, Journal of American Institute of Chemical Engineering, Industrial and Engineering Chemistry Research etc. have an impact factor between 2.0-3.5 yet they are regarded as reputed journals in their fields due to the quality of papers. Ordinarily, you have to choose between impact and high impact factor journals. However, I can only suggest that being a early career researcher, one should prefer high impact factor journals. You can steadily switch from impact factor to impact research publications as you move from early career to midcareer and top-career researcher.

Success rate

It is hard to measure the success rate of research manuscripts published in any journal. However, we could estimate this rate it will also help us to publish our research. To get a simple idea, you can divide the number of research papers published (similar to your manuscript) in a target journal with the total number of research papers published in each issue. To get an average success rate, you need to get the success rate for at least 4-5 issues of a journal. The moderate success rate is 20-30%.

Journal finder tool

One handy choice of your target journal can be the reference section of your prepared manuscript. You need to calculate the frequency of the journals appearing in your reference list. The most frequent journal becomes an ultimate choice for your manuscript. However, to facilitate the selection of your target journal, Elsevier has developed an online tool, Elsevier® Journal Finder (http://journalfinder.elsevier.com/). The researchers just need to put the title and abstract of prepared manuscript, and to choose fields of research i.e. engineering and technology. The tool will list all of the potential target journals in Elsevier database that publish similar research papers with the weblink, impact factor, processing time, success rate etc. You can also try Edanz Journal Selector (https://www.edanzediting.com/journal-selector).