Choosing a Journal: Goals, Fit, and Impact Factor (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Which journal should you submit your manuscript to? I'm Professor Stuckler, and listen, I get this question almost daily. Researchers come to me with their nice, shiny manuscript. They finish the research. They're ready to go. But then, when it comes to the concrete next step, they hit a stumbling block. Which journal should I submit to? There's hundreds in my field. What's the trade-off? How do I do this in the right way? It really can be bewildering, and there's a lot to think about. And whether you're new in the field or you have tons of experience and even published before, what I'm going to do in this video is break down the steps and things, key considerations, factors you need to consider to help you optimize your path to publication. Listen, I've coached and mentored hundreds of researchers who have no experience whatsoever through to that whole transformational journey of getting their first paper out and submitting like a pro. If you're interested to see what we could do for you, click the link below, set up a call with me or a member of our team, and let's see if we're a good fit to work together. All right, let's dive in. The first thing that you need to think about are your goals. And if you haven't made a broader career roadmap for yourself as an academic, you need that sense of clarity and direction because that is going to guide, not just the steps you take on your research, but even this micro, but critically important step of which journal to submit to. If you're at a stage where you just need to tick a box and just get a paper, say, to count for your PhD, now's probably not the time to aim for the highest of the high-impact journals, the most prestigious, reputable ones. So if your priority is speed, you probably need to check the journal to look at what the average peer review time is, following the steps that I'm showing you here in the background. And if that average peer review time is more than six months, that tells you that even if everything goes perfectly well and they send your paper out to reviewers, six months before you even get a chance to revise, you're probably looking at nine months to a year before your paper actually gets accepted. The second type of thing that you may need to optimize is it may be you're looking to publish as a rite of passage. And I definitely know for the researchers who work in social science, for example, in econ or in sociology, getting into the top American economic or American sociological journals is a rite of passage. And many will see that as, well, if you haven't cleared that step, you're definitely going to struggle to get on the tenure track and get those assistant professorship jobs at top universities. That is a different game fundamentally that you're playing that's going to shape your choices in the field. The third is that maybe you just want to maximize impact. That you're doing this, like a lot of the researchers who I love to work with, because they want to make a real difference on the field. They want to amplify their voice and be heard. Maybe they have some ideas that they think can make a real difference in the world. And there, your choice may not be to play all the games of the very top journals, but go to specialist journals in your field. The ones that are going to speak directly to the audience who needs your message the most. But listen, overall, if you don't have these goals, you will be lost at sea. And you don't want to be stumbling like a walking zombie, sleepwalking through life from one paper to the next. You want to be in control of your destiny, in control of your career. And I highly encourage you to get those academic goals in your mind straight so you know what you're trying to accomplish with your research so that you can make informed decisions about what journal to aim to. The next thing you need to think about is the fit of the journal that you're looking for. It is important because if you look at the top reasons, we did another review on this, top reasons papers get rejected. One of the top reasons is that the editors just say, well, this isn't a fit with our readership. Great paper, technically sound, well done, everything, but just not right for us. And so you need to figure out how to assess that kind of fit of your paper. And there are a few ways to do this. And some, the clues will come directly from looking at your manuscript. So one way is to look in the introduction. And in your introduction, you should be citing the gap and you should be citing other scholars in your field. And look at, go to your reference list and see what journals they're publishing in. Those are likely journals where the debate's being had, where the discussion is. And I would encourage you to consider those as potential good fits because the closest correlate of the success of your paper is going to be the success of papers that are quite similar to yours. And often you're citing those similar papers to yours, sometimes what we call in our research program as nearest neighbor conceptual papers, they're going to be right there. And often the editors themselves will be looking in the introduction to find reviewers from who you've cited in that background evidence part of the introduction. By the way, if you want a full video on writing up the introduction, just to check that you've got yours right, use our three-part method. It really, it's the hardest section to write, makes it a whole lot easier. So check that out. But once you get that, you should be able to identify a few journals that, at least on the surface of it, fit. The other thing you need to look at is if those journals publish your type of method. So I see some researchers say who want to do a systematic review, but then they submit to a journal that's never published a systematic review before. Or they're maybe trying to do a quantitative or qualitative analysis, but they're looking at journals that don't publish that kind of research. So you also need to go to the journal, search in the journal. Say if you're doing a qualitative analysis and you want to submit to the British Medical Journal, well, you would find the British Medical Journal isn't publishing qualitative papers anymore. Whatever you think about that, good or bad, that's just the case. So don't waste your time putting that one on your list. So the second thing you need to do after you've got your goals clear is to establish fit. Finally, the third criterion you want to look for within these constraints of your goal, if my goal is saying, well, I've got to go fast, and then a fit, it's like, well, only a certain set are really going to fit or accept the kind of paper that I've done, you then might want to optimize within that for impact factor or the rank of the journal. I'll show you here in the background. There are several ways you can figure this out. But often, if you just Google the name of the journal, you're going to find something called the impact factor. And this, I won't get into the mechanics of how that's calculated, but it's really just quantifying how much papers in that journal get cited. And so the more citations they have, the higher the rank they are in the field. Typically, this is associated with more competitiveness. So I know that if I submit to one of the most prestigious medical journals, The Lancet, where the acceptance rates are under 5%, I know that even if I've just produced the average paper in the field, I'm likely to get rejected, get a desk reject, not even being sent out for peer review. And I have to say, look, if you're not getting rejected, sometimes you're just not aiming high enough. So guys, if you never get a rejection, you're doing something wrong. You are making a mistake. You need, you want to get rejections. And I've still got hanging on my wall one of the first rejections I ever got. That's for another story. So what I want you to do is rank those journals. And within ones that you find that meet your goals and are plausible fits, then you can highlight and start to rank order which ones have the greatest impact. And that leads me to the final step you need to have completed before you submit. And that is you want a shortlist. Have a shortlist of five journals. And the reason for this is I often see researchers come to me after they've submitted. Maybe they got a desk reject. They finally got that rejection, which is a badge of honor. You should be happy for that. But that says this has happened. It's also going to help you to improve. But you want to have that shortlist so you're locked and loaded and ready to go. So I've seen too many researchers to get that. Maybe that first desk rejection, they're completely deflated and they never even submit again, which is a terrible loss. Especially if you do get a desk reject. You can't glean a lot of meaningful information from it. Just that the editor didn't think it was a fit or maybe a strong enough contribution to the field. That's where it also helps to get some real human feedback. Again, click the link below if you would like some real human feedback on your manuscript. But what I would suggest you do before going for it at all is make that shortlist. Have locked and loaded ready to go your five manuscripts. So that desk reject does come and let's hope it does one day. You will be able to just not even think about it. Use your reference manager to update your references to the new journal you want to send to and go to the very next one on your list. Listen, guys, let me know in the comments if you're able to employ these tips and follow the suggestions we've made to help you hone in on the right journal for you at this moment of time in your career. I look forward to seeing you in the next video. And again, if you would like a more personalized approach to your needs, wherever you are in your research stage, we have got a support system in place for you. Again, wherever you are, check out the links below and I'd love to see if we're a possibility to work together. See you in the next video, guys.