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Where to Publish Your Research: Identifying Potential Journals

What is Open Access and what are Article Processing Charges?

Welcome!

This guide is designed to assist  faculty members in-

  • Identifying potential  journals in which to publish
  • Exploring tools to identify specific journals of interest
  • Knowing the pros and cons of open access journals
  • Identifying  open access journals with author fees

PHOTO TIMETRAX23/FLICKR (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Contact your departmental subject librarian  if you need assistance finding journals.

Acceptance Rates

In general,  lower  journal acceptance acceptance rates are  considered more prestigious. 

Listed below are the few resources that include the acceptance rates of a journal.  Acceptance rates are sometimes provided on publisher websites as part of the instructions to authors material.   If you cannot find the acceptance rate of a journal by using the tools provided or viewing the journal's website, try contacting the editor directly.  Be aware that some journals make their acceptance rates easily available, others consider this proprietary information and do not . 

Acceptance Rates By Discipline Associations or Societies

Websites of professional organizations/societies sometimes will provide data on acceptance rates for journals they publish. 

 

American Psychological Association (APA).  Rates are listed in these reports for each journal.  

Association for the Advancement of Computers in Education review policy & acceptance rates.

Selecting Journals- A Short Video

from Think. Check. Submit. on Vimeo.

Think. Check. Submit. is a campaign  endorsed by many scholarly organizations worldwide to  help researchers identify trusted journals for their research. It is a simple checklist researchers can use to assess the credentials of a journal or publisher.

Which Journal?

Try searching for the topic of your article in a relevant database to see where related articles in your field have been published.

In addition, you may also consider using the following databases and tools.  This list isn't exhaustive but does provide some good starting points.  

Here are some directories of journals and some publisher specific tools for locating journals-

Predatory Journals? What To Look For

 Predatory open access publishing is an exploitative open-access publishing business model that involves charging publication fees to authors without providing the editorial and publishing services associated with legitimate journals (open access or not).

Be iNFORMEd 
Checklist designed to help researchers determine whether or not to publish in a journal. Created by the Duke University Medical Center Library & Archives.

 

Beall's List- For many years, Jeffery Beall, a librarian at University of Colorado maintained a list  of "predatory publishers" on his website.  The list has always been a source of much debate among both scholars and the publisher community.  That list was taken down in January, 2017. 

ARCHIVED LIST (As of January, 2017) Beall's List: Potential, Possible, or Probable Predatory Scholarly Open-Access Publishers 
This is Beall's final list, as hosted in the Internet Archive. 

 

Be Careful About Solicitations!