Publishing Your Research: Finding a journal

Several instruments have been developed to statistically assess the quality of journals by their impact.

Google Scholar Metrics Google ranks journals based on 5-Index (5 year hindex) and h5-median.  Filters by broad subject area, e.g. Engineering and Computer Science and by language. 

Journal Citation Reports (JCR) provide data that helps you evaluate and compare scholarly journals in the sciences and social sciences based on citations in indexed articles to other articles in a particular journal. The journal impact factor is a measure of the frequency with which the "average article" in a journal has been cited in a particular year. The impact factor will help you evaluate a journal's relative importance, especially when you compare it to others in the same field.

Eigenfactor Created as a competitor to JCR's Impact Factors, the Eigenfactor™ Score is a measure of the overall value provided by all of the articles published in a given journal in a year.  The Article Influence™ Score is a measure of a journal's prestige based on per article citations.  The site also evaluates the cost effectiveness of journals.

SCImago Journal Rank The SJR is another competitor to JCR's Impact Factors, created from the Scopus database.  It expresses the average number of weighted citations received in the selected year by the documents published in the selected journal in the three previous years.

There are a number of resources to help find an appropriate journal such as databases, publishers and lists.

Scopus - search it on your topic then click on Analyze Search Results and on the next screen click on the "card" that says Document per  year by source. A list of journal titles will be on the left.

Web of Science  - search it on your topic, then click on Analyze Results at the top right of the results list.  At the next screen, select Publication Titles. 

Elsevier Journal Finder - search for a specific journal or subject keyword or match your abstract to a list of Elsevier's titles.

Oxford Academic - general publishing tips including peer review and publicizing articles.

Sage - helpful tips to choose journals.

Wiley's Journal Finder - search for a specific journal or match your title/abstract to one of Wiley's titles.

JANE: Journal / Author Name Estimator - search by keyword or enter your title or abstract of your paper. JANE will then compare your document to millions of documents in PubMed and the Directory of Open Access Journals.

Directory of Open Access Journals

Case Reports - a list of journals that accept case reports, compiled by the Open Science Framework. Some guidelines for writing a case report.