Speaker 1: Do you know there is an existence of more than 70,000 research journals, rising at a rate of around 3.5% per year? Well, as the number of journals has ballooned, and also due to expansion of zones of specialization and advent of interdisciplinary topics, procedure of choosing a suitable journal for publication of a manuscript is a daunting task. So if you are planning to submit a manuscript in any reputed journal, don't worry, because today in this video, I'm going to talk about everything that you need to know when selecting a journal for publication of your manuscript. So let's get started. Let's first understand what is a journal. Journal is an academic publication, comprising of articles, which can be review article or research article, written by professors, scientists, researchers, and other connoisseurs. Now these journals, they emphasize, the journals, they emphasize a precise discipline of study. Discipline, like scientific discipline, be physics, chemistry, or biology. Now other than journals, I'm sure you might have heard about magazines and newspapers as well, right? So how journal is different from magazine and newspaper? Magazine and newspaper, they are intended for common readers, whereas journals are not for common readers, they are for the technical or scholastic audience. Now these, the journals, they basically provide an authentic platform, they provide an authentic platform to the researchers, to the scientists, to the students, all across the globe to impart the knowledge, impart the knowledge in form of superior quality research work in different subjects. Now the key points of journal are, that the journals, they present most up-to-date research and they, the publication of the journals is in an ordered manner. That is, the journals are published monthly, quarterly, so they are always published in an ordered manner. So here you can see, this is a journal, Trends in Biotechnology, so if you visit the website of any journal, there are two things that you will commonly see, that is the issue number and the volume number. So what is the issue number? Issue number, it represents how many times the periodical has been published during that period. That is whether that periodical has been published the monthly, quarterly or biannually. And always remember that the set of issues, they assemble to make a volume. So volume number, it refers to number of years that text has been in publication. So this means that if the first volume of publication, let's say was in year 2011, then in year 2022, it will be in its 11th volume. So volume of the journal is always numbered yearly, while issue can be published several times within the same year. And also, the journals can be published in online formats or prints and even booked. Now as we are talking about journals, I am sure you all must have heard about the term peer-reviewed journals as well. So, one thing that you always have to keep in mind is that all the journals are not peer-reviewed journals. And you always should aim for peer-reviewed journals, like if you want to submit a manuscript for publication in a journal, always go for peer-reviewed journals. So what is the meaning of the term peer-reviewed? Peer-reviewed means that when authors submit a paper that have written to journal, journal editor then sends the article to author's peers, which can be researchers, other scholars who are in same discipline for review. Now these reviewers, they determine that if article should be published based on the quality of research. So every peer-reviewed journal will have an editorial board of subject experts who review and evaluate submitted article before accepting them for publication. So why this review process is important? This review process is basically, first of all, it is designed to assess the validity of the data that you have included in your research work, the quality of the content of your article and most importantly to assess the originality of the article for publication. So this review process, it is, its ultimate purpose is to maintain the integrity of science by filtering out invalid or poor quality articles. Now you might be wondering how you will determine that whether journal is peer-reviewed or not. So the best thing that you can do is visit the journal's website. A journal is peer-reviewed or not, all that information you will find in journal website. So here you can see this is a journal of proteins and proteomics and clearly if you read about this journal, if you go visit the website and read about this journal, it's clearly mentioned here that it's a peer-reviewed international journal. So all the information, whether a journal is peer-reviewed or not, you will find it in the journal website itself. The question arises, like just I mentioned few minutes back that you should always aim for peer-reviewed journal. So question arises, how to select a peer-reviewed journal for submission of manuscript? So very first point is, find out a match between the subject of your article and aim and scope of journal. Aim and scope is very-very important, reading aim and scope of a journal, peer-reviewed journal is very-very important. Because if you do, like usually many of the researchers, they don't take this information very seriously and believe me, the most common cause for rejection of a journal is when there is a mismatch between the manuscript and aim and scope of the journal. So again, where will you find the information about the aim and scope of a journal? So you will find it in the journal website. So here you can see, this is Nanobiotechnology journal and here you can see that when you visit the journal website, the aim and scope is mentioned there. So just click on it and all the information you will get. Similarly, this is Trends in Biotechnology. So when you read the aim and scope, you will get an idea what type of journal, what type of work, research work, the articles based on research work, this particular journal accepts. So like here, the major theme of this Trends in Biotechnology journal is that it includes bioprocessing, omics, materials and device, therapeutics and agro-environment. So basically, this particular journal will seek articles that are relevant to any of these themes or even more than one of these themes, right? So if your research work is related to any of these themes, definitely you can submit your work over here. But if it is not related, then definitely you need to look for any other peer-reviewed journal. Then also information about the journal can be obtained from a literature review. Like it is always advisable to read a few of the articles that journal has already published and then determine any similarity between the manuscript and those already published. So even while going through the literature review, you get an idea like what type of article a journal publishes and accordingly even then also you can make a selection of the journal for your manuscript. Then second point that you have to keep in mind is readership and target audience. While selecting a journal, always decide like what readership you are going for, what is your target audience because journals can be multidisciplinary or speciality journal. Now what is the meaning of multidisciplinary or speciality journal? So multidisciplinary, that is their broad-based journal. They publishes research papers from various areas of research. So if you want to target a wide target audience and non-technical audience, then multidisciplinary journals you can always go for. Like we have the examples are Nature, Science, these are the two journals. Then speciality journal, when we talk about, so always go for the speciality journal like basically speciality journals are those which are like, which are technical or highly specialized, right. If your paper is a technical or highly specialized, then you should go for the speciality journal because they are not broad. They only focus on a particular subject like you have a journal of immunology, right. So this is an example of a speciality journal and it is better to publish in a journal with a small but very specific target audience. So this is one of the suggestions I would like to give you all because if you see the journals like Nature and Science, they have high impact factor and even they have more citations. But if you see the acceptance rate, it is very low because they are broad-based journals. A lot of, they publishes research from various areas of research. So you can imagine how many manuscripts are being sent to these journals for review process, right. However, when you talk about speciality journal like journal of immunology, so although they do not have very high impact factor and citation, but the acceptance rate is more in comparison to the multidisciplinary journal because they are concise to a particular subject. So definitely the manuscript which have been sent to these journals, they will be limited in comparison to multidisciplinary journal. But again, it completely on your interest, what you are looking for, if you want high impact factor, if you want more citations, and even if you want to target more, if you want to target wide audience, then you can always go for multidisciplinary journal. Then third point, visibility, visibility of journal is again very, very important. See once a paper has been published, once your manuscript has been published, it should be easily findable by the researchers, right. So always check whether the journal is indexed in subject specific databases prevalent in specific field. Subject specific databases like databases like Scopus, ScienceDirect, then you have PubMed is there, directory of open access journal is there, right. Because index journals are higher scientific, are of higher scientific quality as compared to non-index journal. So when you are going, like when you are looking for the journal, see there the indexing also, okay, that whether the journal is indexed or not, if it is indexed, what are the databases in which it is indexed. And even always check the online availability of the journal as well. Online availability is important because I told you see the journals can be in printed form, in online form or both. Now when the journal is, if it is circulated in printed form, it can utterly limit a count of the people reading or discovering in work, right. But if it is an online, definitely there will be like, there will be a lot of people who will be reading or discovering your work in comparison to the people like, if the, your work is being circulated, if the works published in a journal is circulated in the printed form. Now moving to CV value of publication. So basically, a premium is put on the journal prestige by some authors and so this journal prestige can be determined by always checking the editorial board members, journal sponsorship and impact factor. So editorial board members, so you can visit the journal website to check out the names on the editorial board, whether the board is well known in the field of study, you can easily found out by, find out by checking the journal website. Then even journal sponsorship is also there, so it should be known whether the prestigious society in the field owns or sponsors the journal. And then impact factor. What is impact factor? It measures the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year. And remember, higher the impact factor, more highly ranked the journal is. So these are the three things that you should always look for while going for selection of a review, peer-reviewed journal. Then turnaround time of the journal is also very, very important. Turnaround time means how long a journal take to publish article. So you need to understand that when you submit an article for publication in a journal, definitely it has to go through several steps, like first you will be submitting your manuscript, then it will be reviewed, then you will be receiving the message for acceptance, if everything goes well, and then finally your paper will be published. So you need to know about all these steps. So how long a journal take to publish article, with that it means that you should know about the numbers of issues published by a journal in a year, like the journal is published in monthly, quarterly, or biannually, because if a monthly journal is there, it is most likely to review the article faster as compared with a journal that publishes only once a year. And even sometimes you need to keep a track of the dates, like when you have submitted the article and when the article has been accepted. So because there can be substantial delay between the submission and publication with a few journals. So even you have to keep the track of the submission and acceptance date and also you need to be familiar with the turnaround time of the journal as well. Now let me tell you some tools that will help you in journal selection. One is the think.check.submit. So it's a sort of a checklist that will be helpful for you to assess the credentials of the journal or the publisher. So it provides this particular tool, it provides an efficient way to filter out predacious journal. Predacious means like fraudulent, deceptive, or pseudo journals, false journals. So it provides an efficient way to filter out predacious journals in the selection process. So it's better to use such tools which can assist you to find a reliable journals for publication of your research work or any review article. Then another tool is find my journals, which is sort of a mathematical tool which is being used for shortlisting the befitting journals. So with the help of this, you get to select the most suitable journal for publication of your manuscript. And these are the links that you can refer to visit to think.check.submit or find my journal. Now, so these are the few points that you have to keep in mind when selecting a peer review journal. So I would like to give you some more, I would like to give you a summary of the points that you need to keep in mind, you need to ensure while considering selection of a journal. So first is the compatibility that your compatibility of the subject article and the general subject focus should be there, right? It's like if your work is something related to immunology, it's better to go for journal of immunology rather than going for a multidisciplinary journal, right? Or like to any journal who doesn't accept such kind of research work. Then another thing that you need to ensure is that whether journal accept type of article that is intended for submission. So again, you have to go for like, as I mentioned earlier, you need to read the aim and scope of the journal. So you'll get a better idea of what type of journal, what type of article the journal, what type of work journal usually considered for publication. Then whether the journal is read by target audience. So what is your target audience? Is it a wide target audience or a selective target audience, technical or non-technical that also you have to keep in mind. Then also ensure that your journal is being included in subject specific and bibliographic databases. So as I mentioned earlier, that your journal should be indexed. It should be in databases like Scopus, PubMed and ScienceDirect or directory of open access journals. Then online edition of the journal is also important. So this is the summary of the points that I have told you so far. Then journal impact factor is in line with one's requirement. So let's say you decide to go for impact factor more than 10, right? So always check the impact factor of the journal, that whether that impact factor of the, the impact factor you're looking for, that journal focus that on or not. Then always remember journal is regarded as prestigious one by, also you need to ensure that whatever journal, whichever journal you are submitting your work, research work, it should be considered by, considered to be prestigious by the colleagues and peers as well. Then what is the frequency of journal publication? Obviously if a journal publishes monthly, definitely your, like as I mentioned earlier again, that if it is publishing once in a year, definitely like you can understand that if the journal is publishing monthly or yearly, there's a lot of difference, right? It's always, you can aim for, if you want the fast publication, definitely go for journals who publishes monthly and also publication charges. What is the publication charges of the journal, if any, that you also have to keep in mind. So always consider these key factors while choosing a journal, the visibility of the journal, notability, publication charge and the speed. So this is the four key factors that you have to keep in mind, like from the summary of the points that I told you broadly, these are the four key factors that you have to keep in mind. So here I have mentioned few distinguished journals for biotechnology specifically. So you can go for Nature Biotechnology, Nature Methods, Nature Biomedical Engineering, PLOS Medicine, Plant Biotechnology Journal, Trends in Biotechnology is there, PMC Biology is there, Protein and Cell is there, Annual Reviews of Animal Biosciences is there, Molecular Ecology Resources is there, Biotechnology Advances, Trends in Food Science and Technology, Bioactive Material, Current Opinion in Biotechnology and Biosensors and Bioelectronics. So I have given you around 15 journals, peer reviewed journals for biotechnology because most of the students, they ask us that, ma'am, could you suggest the few journals which we can go for by submitting our manuscript? So these are the few of the few journals that you, distinguished journals that you can go for. So visit their website and check the names and scope, right? What are their, if any charges, publication fees is there, or like what is the issue number, right? Volume number, all that you can check by visiting the journal's website. So this is all about the journals, I'm sure you have liked the video. And I hope now you get an idea, get the clarity that what you need to know while you are selecting a journal for submission of the manuscript for publication. Choosing a right journal can accelerate publication of your manuscript. So keep these points in mind, which I have told you in this video. All the very best, do like, share and subscribe. Thank you.