It is easy to get anxious and overwhelmed when selecting journal for your paper. Learn 3 mistakes you must avoid to publish your research paper in quality journals!
So you wrote your paper and it’s time to select the journal to which you want to submit it, but you’ve somehow struggled to select a quality journal that will be the best and the most appropriate for your research. Well, I do get that I’ve been there and I struggled as well.
Let me share some of my academic publishing tips and tell you what are the key mistakes that people make when selecting journals.
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Why selection of an academic journal that is a good fit for your journal publication matter?
Well, selecting a journal is an important step in the journal publication process, mostly because that decision will largely influence whether your academic paper will be accepted or rejected faster, right? Because if you select a quality journal for your paper, it is likely more likely that it will be accepted, of course, after several rounds of review.
Selecting the right journal is not an easy process at first, mostly because if you don’t have experience with academic publishing, you don’t know whether your work is good enough.
You may not know whether the reviewers will like your paper and you may not know which journal to select. Well, selecting journal that is appropriate, as I said, does matter. it is because if you select the journal that is too good for your paper (i.e. too high impact factor), not diminishing the value of your paper, your paper may be rejected. We have to be realistic about the quality of our manuscripts before we send them to journals for peer review, we have to adhere to the high standards of selected international journals and we have to manage our expectations.
You do have to develop that mindset that if your academic paper quality is good enough to be published in a high quality journal, then go ahead, submit the top 1%, submit it to 5% international journal.
And don’t worry if it’s rejected – at least you tried to send your work to a high quality academic publication. Nothing bad happens, right? The world doesn’t end there, and you still have a chance to submit it somewhere else. The story would be different if we had just one chance to submit our papers. But remember, the rejection is just feedback. And by giving yourself a chance to publish in the top academic journals, you may be pleasantly surprised.
If your paper is rejected after the journal peer review process, you often get some additional feedback from the editors and from the reviewers. You can use this feedback to improve your work and then submit to somewhere else.
But why do researchers struggle when selecting a journal? Well, there are a couple of mistakes many people commit that result in either desk rejection or rejection by reviewers. So let me tell you the three main reasons why international journals may reject your paper, especially because the journal selection was not right.
Mistake number #1 when selecting journal: Lack of alignment between the paper scope and the journal scope
Mistake number one is that there is a lack of alignment between the paper and the scope of the journal. It seems trivial. Right? But you do have to verify whether the journal’s scope is aligned with your paper. It’s insufficient to use a journal finder. It is mostly because, well, the journals evolve over time.
I’ve experienced that myself and I committed this mistake myself. Let me tell you why it matters. Some time ago, I did publish in a specific journal. It was Applied Energy. That was a couple of years ago, and at that time that journal published almost all work related to my research field. They did publish quite a lot of papers in that area, and that was within their scope, right?
So I found it relatively easy to publish there. But as the journal evolved, as the journal changed, it changed its direction a little bit. It started to become more difficult to actually publish there because my research kind of diverged from where the journal was heading.
And I haven’t checked whether my paper’s and the journal’s scope were actually aligned. And that’s what actually caused a couple of rejections from my end. When I finally checked what happened and why my paper was rejected.
I realized that the journal changed the direction slightly, and as a result, I would need to kind of tailor my paper in a little bit different way so that it aligns with the journal’s scope. So that was mistake number one that I made, but also many other people made.