Selecting a journal for your work

From the March 2009 GSA newsletter (Amber Watts, Secretary):

One of the primary goals of emerging scholars is to learn the ins and outs of getting published, yet we rarely have formal training on issues like how to select a journal that suits our work. Here are some tips that might help.

Start by asking yourself some questions:

1. What are my goals?
Is your piece informative, proposing theory, building on previous results. Many journals have a statement of goals that help you assess whether your work fits. Some journals only accept empirical work; others publish literature reviews, qualitative studies, or policy analysis.

2. Who is my intended audience?
Are you talking to MDs, policy makers, academics? Who would you expect to be most interested in your results and their implications? You may want to consider journals specific to Gerontology, but journals from other disciplines may also be a good fit. Try education journals, nursing journals, journals of family studies, policy journals, just to name a few.

3. What tier am I shooting for?
Not all papers will make it to Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Does that mean you shouldn’t try? Get advice from co-authors and mentors about the tier of journal you should shoot for. In deciding to aim high, you may want to consider how long you are willing to wait on getting reviews or revising the paper. If it gets rejected you might want to have a back up plan for where to send it next.

4. Where do the people I know publish?
In what journals do your mentors publish? What about your peers or students that completed their degrees before you? What journals do you cite in your work?

Do your research:

1. Find relevant journals.
Use an electronic database to do a broad search for possible journals. For example, there are 41 journals with titles including the word “aging” and 23 with the word “gerontology” listed on PubMed Journal Database. Only 3 come up when you narrow the search to “psychology” and “aging” as title keywords.

2. Search individual journal websites.
Most journals have a description, statement of purpose and intended audience, instructions for authors who want to submit. You can also look at the list of editors for the journal. Are they names you recognize from your field?

3. Look at examples of other articles published in the journal.
A good way to determine what the journal will accept is by seeing what they have already published. Do the articles seem similar in topic, scope, audience, methods, manuscript length to what you are hoping to submit? Has your topic already been covered ad nauseum in that journal? Look through the tables of contents for the last few years and take an in depth look at a couple of articles.

4. Find out the journal’s impact factor.
The impact factor is a rating scale that gives us an idea of how important the journal is, how frequently it is read and cited, and indirectly indicates how tough it is likely to be to get accepted there. You may want to start with the less visible, lower tier journals for your first submissions.

5. Ask the editor.
Once the paper is ready to submit, it never hurts to email the editor your abstract and ask if it is something they are interested in at the moment.

6. Look for calls for papers.
Often journals have special issues on a certain topic and put out a request for submissions. For example, The Journal of Aging and Social Policy recently put out a call for papers on Advancing Aging Policy for the Second Decade of the Century.