Tools for Physicians

Selecting a suitable journal for submitting your publication is a process that needs experience and knowledge.  Below is a list of criteria that need to be looked into:

• Aims and Scope: for a candidate journal the Aims and Scope should be read carefully to guarantee the submission of papers within the journal's subject coverage.
• Journal/Author Name Estimator (JANE): enter title &/or abstract of your paper and click 'Find journals', JANE will compare your document to millions of documents in Medline to find the best matching journals.
• PubMed PubReMiner: helps you select an appropriate journal from PubMed.
• Elsevier Journal Finder: helps you find an appropriate Elsevier journal for your publication.
• Springer Journal Suggester: helps you find an appropriate Springer or BioMedCentral journal for your publication.
• PubMed/Medline(OVID): search for your topic to see which journals publish articles on that topic. Some journals accept only certain types of publications, if this is the case then while searching in PubMed apply filters to limit to the required publication type.
• Audience: who is the intended audience, are they specialized or generalized ones?
• Impact Factor (IF): search Journal Citation Reports (JCR) to identify a journal that has an IF. IF is the average number of citations per paper published in the last 2 years, but this has its shortcomings and so other tools like H-index were introduced to accommodate these limitations. Not all journals have IF, and many non-prestigious journal’s website presents fabricated fake IF. Below is a list of JCR journals published in/about Arab countries and fall within the broad biomedical field:

• Indexing Services: a journal that is indexed in Medline or PubMed is a bonus. But be aware of those that appear in PubMed only because some of its free articles reside in PubMedCentral. For a good journal choice, make sure it is indexed in Medline, as here they do critical evaluation of journals before accepting them to be indexed in Medline.
• Open Access OA: this option though might result in more readerships of papers, but may not result in more citations!  Here authors may be asked to pay for the article processing fee to make the paper freely available.  But beware of the many OA publishers that are really predatory and are claiming their journals to be scholarly and peer-reviewed. One place where to check for a good open-access journal for your publication is the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) (The Journals in red font in the table are in DOAJ).
• Scientific quality: check if it is a peer-reviewed journal, where reviewers critically study the paper manuscript for quality of content and methodology to detect bias. Although this is mostly a subjective activity yet it stands as a good point for the validity of paper, and some utilize a single/double-blinded review process.
• Publisher and the editorial board: check if the journal has a user-friendly organized website, and what is the average time between submissions to publication.
• Get advice from colleagues that have previously submitted to the particular journal you are considering a submission to.

Once you decide on the journal that you want to submit your manuscript, follow the specific instructions to authors that Mulford Library collected in its Instructions to Authors in the Health Sciences.

last updated Jun 3, 2020