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.
Mistake number #2 when selecting journal: Lack of sufficient novelty to justify publication in the selected journal
Mistake number two is novelty is not sufficient for a selected journal. So that is something that you need to learn and you need to get experience with.
Of course, for each paper to be published needs to present a novelty. It needs to contribute to science and towards our knowledge. Right? So that’s given. You need to have novelty. You need to have original research to be published. But the level of the novelty will be different in each paper and then journals in Q1, so that’s top 25% of international journals, will require much bigger, much greater novelty, which has more potential for impact than, for example, journals from Q3 and Q4. That is why you need to be able to critically assess the novelty of your work.
It’s not easy. It’s not easy because we are attached to our work, right? You spend weeks, months, sometimes even years developing your research, planning your experiment and then running your experiments and analysis.
And then you wrote your paper. You expect it to be the best paper ever. We’ve all been there! But in order to pass through the peer review process, you do need to benchmark your paper against the current state of the art. You do need to benchmark that paper against what the selected journal is actually publishing so that you are able to confidently respond to the following question:
Is my paper good enough for the journal or do I need to consider a journal with slightly lower impact factor?
Of course, impact factors are vanity metrics. Let’s agree to that. So the impact factor of the journal isn’t really the best measure of the journal’s quality. But somehow we we still use them. Impact factors give us some sort of quantitative indication of how well the journal performs and how prestigious it is in your research field.
Putting the impact factors aside, you have to make sure that your novelty is sufficient for the journal you chose to send your paper to. And you have to be honest with yourself. And if you struggle to do it, ask your supervisor or your colleagues to review your paper before you actually submit it to a selected journal. This will give the confidence that your paper will not be rejected by the editors outright.
If you don’t have anyone to ask, check Google Scholar, Scopus or other journal databases and compare the degree of novelty in the academic papers published by the journal you selected.
Mistake number #3 when selecting journal: Manuscript is not tailored to guidelines provided by the journal
Another mistake, third mistake people make when selecting a journal, is that they basically don’t tailor the manuscript to the selected journal. That is so obvious, but many people don’t read submission guidelines. These usually include relevant information about the formatting, references, length of the manuscript, number figures, length of the abstract, title structure, abstract structure, paper structure.
You know, all of that is super important because each publisher (and each journal) may have different requirements for your paper. They may have many reasons for that. It could be space reasons, although this should no longer be an issue in the digital world. It could be branding reasons and so on.
Therefore, you do need to check before you submit what structure your manuscript actually needs to have so that you avoid rejection because of such simple things. OK? Because your idea and your novelty might be extraordinary. Your research might be extraordinary. But then if your manuscript is formatted poorly and if it doesn’t align with the journal’s guidelines, it might be the case that the editor will ask you to correct that and resubmit again, or they will simply reject your work outright.
How to avoid key mistakes researchers make when selecting journal?
I hope you now understand the three main reasons why selecting a journal matters and the three main mistakes people make when selecting a journal. How do you avoid those mistakes? I hope you could draw some similarities there in terms of the mistakes that I mentioned.
Basically, you need to be aware of the journal requirements. You need to be aware of how good your work is and you need to develop some kind of a fifth sense or sixth sense about whether your novelty is good enough or not.
This takes experience. Certainly, it may be uncomfortable and overwhelming to select a journal when you don’t have that much academic experience. But remember this, all of us start from zero. The greatest professor in your research field started from zero. I started from zero and understand how frustrating these things can get.
That’s why I encourage you to read all the documents that are provided by the journals, mostly because they might change their requirements that might change their direction and so on.
So to sum up, if you know, if you enjoyed this, if you find this useful please do like, comment, and share this blog post (or associated video and soon podcast!) with your colleagues and your friends so that they can also benefit from it.
And if you need any support in terms of paper writing, your thesis writing and research in principle, feel free to contact me because I’m here to help or check out our Knowledge Hub.
