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What are good criteria for selecting a journal to submit a paper to?

One criterion per answer, please.

It is easy to group journals by subject and prestige, but is there a thought-process that you use to determine which journal is good for your specific paper?

For example, if you have a clearly top paper, it is not hard to find a journal that will accept it (the only question is which top journal to submit it to), but do you have favorite journals for specific types of projects, papers that are not earth-shattering, or other categories of papers?

edited Nov 30 at 17:40

Scott Morrison♦

community wiki

4 revisions, 2 users
Ben Weiss 50%

I think this question is asking for discussion. If you can re-ask it in a way that allow more definitive answers, or perhaps a sorted list of resources, rather than opinions, then do so and flag for reopening. You might consider community-wiki as well. I'm open to disagreement on closing this one. Please comment once and upvote. – Scott Morrison♦ Nov 30 at 16:15

Fair enough. I'll try to rephrase it in more of a question/definitive-answer form; I phrased it this way so that it wouldn't be too specific, while also not overlapping with mathoverflow.net/questions/42/… – Ben Weiss Nov 30 at 16:19

on second thought, you may be right that community-wiki is the right way to go. – Ben Weiss Nov 30 at 16:34

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I think this is a question worth asking, as you can probably guess from the fact that I tried to answer. – Michael Lugo Nov 30 at 16:41

Thank you, Scott, for the edit. It improved the question a lot. – Ben Weiss Nov 30 at 17:58

Michael Lugo · Answer 1 · 2009-11-30 16:41:07Z UTC

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One of the standard heuristics I've heard is to look through the journals that the papers your paper cites were published in, and pick one of those.

This was also discussed in this March 2009 post at Secret Blogging Seminar.

edited Nov 30 at 16:41

answered Nov 30 at 16:10

Michael Lugo
4,540●3●23

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This is standard advice and often quite sound, but depending on how old your citations are can be of limited use. The prestige and interests of the journal may have shifted. – Yemon Choi Nov 30 at 17:51

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"By a theorem of Euler......" – fpqc Nov 30 at 23:39

Kevin McGerty · Answer 2 · 2009-11-30 20:33:45Z UTC

I'd like to mention two (quite different) factors: the time it takes the journal to accept the paper is a serious consideration: however outstanding your papers, it's probably useful for it to be accepted in famous journal X instead of submitted to famous journal X when you go on the job market. I think the AMS periodically publishes average processing time for journals in the Notices.

Another factor I've come to try and consider is how expensive the journal is: journals like Inventiones are extortionately expensive compared with AMS journals (including JAMS, to give a journal of comparable prestige). Rob Kirby has information about this on his webpage, and probably there are more recent sources too. Of course I think this criterion is easier to use when you're more established than when you're starting out.

Yemon Choi · Answer 3 · 2009-11-30 17:51:00Z UTC

It's perhaps not in the spirit of Noble Academe, but increasingly I find myself looking at the editorial board for the journal. If there are people on it with whom I have actual personal professional contact (e.g. discussion at conference, or a prior exchange of work ideas) then -- other things being equal -- I'll be more likely to submit there.

(This is just for those of us whose primary concern is to aim for a decent journal but avoid the immediate "bin-as-intray". If your work is good enough, this shouldn't matter as much.)

Andrew Stacey · Answer 4 · 2009-12-01 08:23:31Z UTC

I combine a number of factors. By the "community wiki rules" I ought to put them one-per-post.

Journal citation index. There are two versions of this: one by ISI and one by the AMS. I use both.

Why do I use them? Because my main reason for selecting a journal is that it gives an indication of the relative importance of the paper to someone who isn't going to read or be able to understand the paper itself. I fully expect a mathematician working in roughly the same area as myself to be able to make a reasonable assessment of my work without paying any attention whatsoever to the journal it appears in. However, from time to time someone completely incapable of doing that needs to get a vague idea of how well I'm doing. At the moment, one of the measures that they use is citation indexes so there is a strong incentive for me to get my papers into journals with the best citation indexes.

I know that citation indexes are unpopular so this answer may well end up at the bottom of the heap! However, I would like to challenge anyone who votes this answer down to put up a replacement that achieves the same end.

Andrew Stacey · Answer 5 · 2009-12-01 08:44:36Z UTC

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There's one piece of information that I would really like to know for each journal but which, as far as I can see, is not (yet) made available:

Time to rejection.

Many journals publish details of the breakdown between submission and publication, but as far as CV points are concerned then once it's accepted then I don't care how long it takes to get actually published. But if, for the sake of argument, we accept that I want to get my article into a high-ranked journal but have time constraints (for example, if I'm looking for a job) then "time to rejection" is the most important piece of information that I can think of. Knowing that, I would submit first to a slightly higher ranking journal than I really thought it should go to knowing that I had enough time to get it into a "safe" bet if they rejected it.

answered Dec 1 at 8:44

Andrew Stacey

community wiki

While I agree with the sentiment, I can't ever see this information being disclosed except on word-of-mouth basis, and "rule-of-thumb" or "hearsay"... – Yemon Choi Dec 1 at 9:00

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@Yemon: which is exactly how most of the information about journals currently circulates! If you read through the answers given at the SBS article on this (cited in another answer) it's quite depressing how many are "word-of-mouth" and "rule-of-thumb" and "hearsay". May be if enough people ask for this information, the journals will provide it; but those who need it (non-tenured mathematicians) are those with the least clout to ask for it. – Andrew Stacey Dec 1 at 9:34

@Andrew: I don't want to turn this into a discussion thread (though I think this is interesting. What I meant was that IMHO, if this ever became official, it would just lead to different ways to "juke the stats" (and put pressure on referees to conform to journal's public image) – Yemon Choi Dec 2 at 5:44

I agree, but I also think that this happens with the current measures and just because it couldn't be done perfectly is not a reason not to do it. However, I think that the whole journal system is fundamentally flawed and I'd rather reform that than fiddle about with the peripheries. – Andrew Stacey Dec 2 at 8:28

Kristal Cantwell · Answer 6 · 2009-11-30 19:05:20Z UTC

There are various issues related to the internet. The author of the paper might want to keep her copyright. I think most journals allow posting of papers on arXive now so posting there even after publication is not an issue in most cases. In fact I have heard of some journals posting their articles on arXive. The manner of submission can involve the internet most journals now have internet submissions systems and that could be an issue. I prefer an internet interface over snail mail but some people might have problems with the internet submission process.

Andrew Stacey · Answer 7 · 2009-12-01 08:37:00Z UTC

"Honest Joe" factor.

(I'm lumping a few together here as this is rapidly going to get out of hand!) How close does the journal fit with my view of how a journal should work? Can I retain copyright? Are my articles free to view for all (rant suppressed with extreme difficulty)? Is the price reasonable? Is the publisher on my "good" list?

Sources: http://www.journalprices.com and the AMS journal survey.

Andrew Stacey · Answer 8 · 2009-12-01 08:28:28Z UTC

Norwegian "level".

Some official body in Norway assigns journals a "level": 2 is very good, 1 is ordinary, and there are journals that don't get a level at all. There are about 100 at level 2 in mathematics. There's some system, which I don't know all of the details about (Harald, are you there?), whereby my department benefits if I publish in higher levels than lower levels. So I try to publish in higher ranked journals than lower ones.

Scott Morrison · Answer 9 · 2009-11-30 17:42:46Z UTC

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See also a previous question: Which are the best mathematics journals?.

answered Nov 30 at 17:42

Scott Morrison♦

community wiki

Andrew Stacey · Answer 10 · 2009-12-01 08:30:54Z UTC

MSC.

I look back at the last N articles in a journal (where N is of the order of a hundred or so) and extract the MSC information. I then divide that into percentages and according to major and minor modes (ie 53 is major, 53C is minor, I don't distinguish further down the tree). I then try to see if there's a good match for my paper.

Andrew Stacey · Answer 11 · 2009-12-01 08:40:57Z UTC

Finally, I guess I should mention how I collate all of that information. I shan't put the whole details here but anyone interested can see it all at this page on my website. Unfortunately, the relevant copyright statements (AMS being surprisingly worse than ISI on this one) mean that I cannot redistribute my data and so make it easy for anyone else to use. However, I can at least make the technique available and that is what is available on the above-linked page.

Andrew Stacey · Answer 12 · 2009-12-01 08:39:08Z UTC

I guess I should mention eigenfactor as well.

As far as I'm concerned, I don't give this much weight. It may be a "better" version of impact factor/citation index but as it isn't used (to my knowledge) by those who I'm hoping to influence in that way, there's no point in using it. And while it may be better, it's still a crude "impact factor" measurement which I completely disagree with.

How to select a journal?

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