Choosing a journal

• Scope: Journals explain their scope on their websites and reject articles that do not match. Make sure you find a journal that matches the scope of your work.
• Quality: Consider the significance and novelty of your work and find a journal with a matching standard.
• Openness: Use the WUR Journal Browser to publish your article Open Access. It helps you to find journals in which you can publish Open Access for free or with discount on the APCs(Author Processing Charges).
• Impact: If your primary aim is to achieve academic impact (e.g., gaining tenure track credits), make sure you publish in a Web of Science (Thomson Reuters) indexed, peer-reviewed journal. Use the WUR Journal Browser to find the impact factor of journals indexed in Web of Science.
• Publishing process: If you are under time constraints, check the journal’s turnaround time for manuscripts. Use SciRev to read about other authors’ experiences with journals in terms of peer review quality, duration, and other characteristics.

Some websites now help you to find journals based on your abstract, e.g., Elsevier’s JournalFinder, Springer Nature’s JournalSuggester, or the publisher-independent JournalGuide. These websites also allow you to filter by subject area or by Open Access journals, and they show some journal metrics, such as the different impact metrics and the speed of the publication process. You can also use the WUR Journal Browser to search for journals by ranking and by open access deals.