Selecting the right journal

So you’ve finally finished your fantastic Nobel-worthy manuscript and you’re ready to submit it to a journal for peer review.  Now what?

First things first: it’s time to pick a journal to submit your paper to.  If you don’t already have one in mind, the easiest way to find a few candidates is to consult your bibliography and check out the two or three journals that you referenced most often.  Chances are that these journals will be similar in scope to your current paper.

Once you have a few candidates in mind, check out the journals’ websites and pay special attention to any section called Aims & Scope, Mission Statement, About the Journal, etc.  This section should explicitly state what sort of papers are considered by the journal.  Ensure that your paper fits within the journal’s scope (i.e., the range of topics that the journal currently covers), is appropriately formatted and is an acceptable article type (e.g., research article, brief communication, etc.).

This is a critical step that many authors overlook; they make assumptions based on a journal’s title or the fact that they submitted a similar paper there 5 years ago and conclude that the journal is an appropriate vehicle for their current manuscript.  However this is not necessarily the case.  Journals constantly evolve in reaction to the needs of their audiences, and a fast-moving subject field might cause rapid and profound changes to a journal.  Therefore it’s important to do this preliminary check every time you prepare to submit a manuscript.

I don’t know about you, but I’m the type of person that needs a bit of motivation before taking on extra work.  Just in case you’re in this club too, allow me to provide you with some motivation.  If you submit your manuscript “blindly,” i.e., you do not do this preliminary check, you run a high risk of processing delay and/or rejection.  If you submit an inappropriate manuscript to a journal, one of the following may happen:

• Immediate rejection. Your manuscript will be returned to you without peer review; you may or may not be allowed to resubmit depending on what the problem is.  Regardless, the time you spent submitting your manuscript was a bit of a waste, don’t you think?

• Review and rejection. Your manuscript may be processed and forwarded to reviewers for evaluation.  Keep in mind that this process can take anywhere from a few days to a few months depending on submission volume and the availability of the specific reviewers qualified to evaluate your manuscript.  It is entirely possible that a problem with the submission will only be noticed at this stage.  This is especially likely if the paper falls outside the journal’s scope, because it is only at this stage that a qualified expert in the field is reading the paper (as opposed to the site administrator with an English major, like myself, who wouldn’t know a polymer from a polygon).  The inappropriate submission will of course be rejected at this point, and you will of course be excessively unhappy because you’ve wasted a huge amount of time and effort.  A few minutes of preliminary checking before submission would save you this heartache and get your paper out to the world faster.

In short: do your homework!

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