Nested Knowledge

• Begin by deciding which field you want to publish in and perform a Google search to find information about journals in that field.
• Journal finders on this list can help you to decide which journals are relevant for your research.
• Sites like www.scimagojr.com rank journals in different fields.
• Pick the ~5 most relevant journals and collect all information for those journals. Nested Knowledge has templates that will help you in this process.

https://www.scimagojr.com is a great way to find journals in any given field.

• One important question you may have involves whether the journal is indexed in PubMed.
• You can search the name of the journal on this page to see if it is indexed: PubMed journal search results.
• You may wish to avoid journals that say that they are “not currently indexed in MEDLINE.” MEDLINE is the largest subset of PubMed.

You may want to pick a journal that is indexed for MEDLINE.

• Another important issue involves the question of journal acceptance rate. Although many journals will not openly disclose acceptance rates, you can try to google this.
• In contrast to acceptance rates, most journals will readily report their citation factors. For most journals, you will typically find this under a tab that is called “For Authors.”
• As a general rule, journals with impact factors greater than 5 will tend to be difficult to publish in. You may want to err on the side of a journal that is not as competitive if you are hoping to get published quickly.
• Another statistic that is often listed under the “For Authors” tab involves the average review time. As a general rule, 1 month is a reasonable review time.

The “For Authors” tab tends to include information on citation rate, review time, and the submission process.

• Another issue to consider is whether the journal accepts the type of article you are submitting.
• You will want to check whether a given journal tends to accept case reports, case series, results of clinical trials, protocols, commentaries, editorials, letters to the editor, systematic/narrative reviews, meta-analysis, or whatever else you would like to submit. It should be noted that some journals do not tend to accept unsolicited review articles.
• A lot of journals will have word limits and restrictions on the number of references, which can be an issue if you have a very long manuscript.

• Unfortunately, journal fees can be harder to find. This information is not generally on the top of the page!
• One suggestion is to google the name of the journal and the word “fees.” For instance, you could do a google search for “JNIS, journal, fees.”
• As a general rule, most open access journals will tend to charge a fee. This fee is generally no more than $3,000 in US dollars. Other journals will charge a fee for colored images, which is often around $500. You will want to confirm with your client that they are willing to pay for these fees before you submit a manuscript.

• Open access means that the articles in the journal will be available to read, download, and reuse per license terms of the journal.
• Although open access may require fees, it has been suggested that the greater accessibility resulting from open access leads to higher citation counts.
• Many advocates also support the basic principle of open access, as it allows people the ability to read papers on medical topics without having to pay money.