Choosing a journal to submit a manuscript to

Choosing the journal for a manuscript means matching it to the kinds of journal and their readers and to the conventions of its discipline, weighing what authors look for in a journal, drawing up a shortlist, checking each candidate's fit, audience, indexing, impact, speed, costs and format, and sounding out a journal with a presubmission inquiry. A field's journals can be compared once and the comparison reused for each manuscript in that field.

When to choose the journal

Choosing the journal for first submission should begin as the paper is conceptualised. ¹ The target journal should, if at all possible, be identified early, before the article is written. ^{2, 3, 4} Identifying it before the article is prepared involves engaging the authors early, ideally during the kickoff call or right at the start. ³ A paper should be written with an audience in mind, rather than written first with its audience decided afterwards. ⁵

A journal identified early lets the writer follow its instructions for authors and write to its style from the outset, which can save time and effort. ^{4, 3} The decision of where to submit can come before the article is complete or after it is written, and can be made for the writer's own work or for another person's. ⁶ If a journal cannot be selected at the planning stage, the paper should be written within a standard framework, which can always be adapted to the requirements of the journal eventually selected: ⁴

• Title
• Authors and affiliations
• Abstract
• Keywords
• Introduction
• Materials and methods
• Results
• Discussion
• Conclusions
• Acknowledgments
• Disclosures
• References
• Figures and tables

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Kinds of journal and their readers

One author arranges medical journals in a broad hierarchy of broad-based peer-reviewed journals, specialty journals and controlled-circulation publications, though many journals do not fit it. ^{7, 8, 9, 10} A simpler division has two major groups: paid-subscription titles, funded by organisational dues or by fee, and controlled-circulation titles, sent free. ⁶

A peer-reviewed journal submits most of its published articles for review by experts who are not part of the editorial staff, and most of the more than 4000 scientific and medical journals published in the world are peer reviewed, though few have strong support from paid subscribers. ⁸ Broad-based peer-reviewed journals sit at the top of the scholarly food chain: most of their content is reports of original research, and they carry advertising but also have a large base of paid subscriber support. ⁸ Many hold that four of them, the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, the BMJ and JAMA, are read and respected internationally. ⁸ The BMJ, published by the BMJ Publishing Group, aims to publish rigorous, accessible and entertaining material that will help doctors and medical students in their daily practice, lifelong learning and career development, and has a weekly circulation of more than 120,000. ⁸ The Massachusetts Medical Society publishes the New England Journal of Medicine, whose circulation far exceeds the number of physicians in the state; Elsevier publishes The Lancet weekly; and the American Medical Association publishes JAMA, which its members receive as a membership benefit and many non-members subscribe to. ⁸

Specialty journals do not all publish original research: American Family Physician publishes peer-reviewed review articles and virtually no original research, to a circulation of more than 180,000. ⁹ Some specialty journals are owned by specialty organisations and heavily subsidised by dues, while others depend more on advertiser support. ⁹ Gut is the official journal of the British Society of Gastroenterology and is edited by the BMJ journals department, membership of the Aerospace Medical Association includes a subscription to the peer-reviewed monthly Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine, and The American Journal of Surgery, published by Elsevier, is the official publication of six surgical societies. ⁹

Controlled-circulation publications depend almost entirely on advertising, and most of them specialise in some way: The New Physician, published by the American Medical Student Association, carries articles on education and health policy for medical students, Cutis covers diseases of the skin, Hospital Practice inpatient care, and Family Practice Management, an online journal, economic issues in family medicine. ¹⁰ They are sometimes called throwaways, ¹⁰ or by another account usually so. ⁶ One physician-author considers the epithet unfair and elitist, because practising physicians read journals such as Postgraduate Medicine, Consultant and Medical Economics: when he published a practice-management article in one and a research report in a peer-reviewed journal in the same month, colleagues in community practice congratulated him on the first and none mentioned the second. ¹⁰ A joke has it that physicians read and discard the throwaways and keep the subscription journals on the office shelf but rarely read them, yet both types serve a purpose and are important. ⁶ Subscription journals generally have smaller circulations, are more formal and carry more research material, while the free titles have almost universal distribution and carry more general, easier-to-read articles that give the writer greater exposure. ⁶

Primary care journals rank high among physicians in nearly every specialty, and publication planners should be aware of it. ¹¹ The New England Journal of Medicine commissions an independent survey every year asking physicians in twelve specialties which journals they consider essential to their practice, and in the 2009 report the top ten journals read by cardiologists included the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Annals of Internal Medicine, Mayo Clinic Proceedings and the American Journal of Medicine. ¹¹

Indexing

Indexing lists a journal's publications in a database, so that an author or scientist who consults PubMed or another reference site on the topic finds the article, and an article that is not indexed is not likely to be found by others. ¹² Most medical journals are indexed, although some are not, and those that are not would like to be. ¹² Whether an article is indexed is determined not by its excellence but by the journal in which it is published, and each indexing organisation makes ongoing decisions about which journals it indexes and which requests it denies. ¹²

Index Medicus and its online counterpart, MEDLINE, both part of the US National Library of Medicine, are used internationally for access to the world's biomedical literature, and Index Medicus contained more than 5500 titles. ¹³ Embase, the Excerpta Medica database, is a biomedical and pharmaceutical database that is especially good for drug-related searches, and it contained approximately 23 million indexed items and more than 7500 current, mostly peer-reviewed journals. ¹³ The Institute for Scientific Information publishes the Science Citation Index and Journal Citation Reports, which every year publishes information, including the impact factor, about more than 11,000 journals in the medical and social sciences. ¹³ A journal can be indexed in more than one database: Gut, for example, is indexed in Index Medicus, in Embase and by the Institute for Scientific Information. ¹²

Index Medicus and MEDLINE decide which journals to index on the scientific merit of a journal's content, meaning its validity, importance, originality and contribution to the field, the objectivity, credibility and quality of its contents, its production quality, an audience of health professionals, and the types of content it carries. ¹² Reports of original research are not the only type included: original clinical observations with analysis, analyses of philosophical, ethical or social aspects of medicine, critical reviews, statistical compilations, descriptions or evaluations of methods or procedures, and case reports with discussions also count, and review-article journals may be indexed. ¹²

Fit to the discipline and the contribution

Each scientific community uses a particular jargon or format for communicating its information, and one author's editor holds that medical writers and editors need to learn to appreciate these differences. ¹⁴ Journals in nursing often expect an extensive literature review in the introduction, while articles in medical journals often have a much shorter introduction and a more extensive discussion section. ¹⁴ When she imposed the medical format on an article for a nursing journal, it was rejected with a stinging note saying the authors needed to learn more about how to write. ¹⁴

Among the many factors that influence the choice of journal are language, target audience, the nature of the paper, such as a report of original research or a state-of-the-art review, and the journal's impact factor. ¹⁵ Factors to consider also include turnaround time, the journal's audience and scope, publication costs, and the novelty and importance of the data. ⁵

Identifying a journal whose specialisation covers the scope of the data to be published is crucial, and one publication planner finds specialisation and scope probably the most important decision, because it decides who the paper reaches. ^{16, 17} Whether the target audience consists of generalists or specialists determines which journal suits: a paper on administering a COVID-19 vaccine, on how effective and how safe it is, probably calls for a general-audience journal to get the widest reach, while a paper on the development and specificities of the vaccine formulation probably calls for a more vaccine-focused journal. ^{15, 17} Whether the work is preclinical or clinical, health economics or epidemiology, and whether it addresses hospital or general practice, also bears on the type of journal. ¹⁷ A paper on a general medical topic, such as irritable bowel syndrome, depression or chest pain, has a wide range of possible journals, while one describing a urological surgical procedure or a method of teaching psychological assessment of the geriatric patient has more limited choices. ¹

A paper on a new drug intended for use by general practitioners should go to a journal with a wide reader base among general practitioners, while for a drug intended for nephrologists the obvious choice is a high-impact journal in that area. ¹⁸ Detailed pharmacokinetics or assay methods should probably not be part of a report on a clinical trial in a clinical journal, but should be reported in an appropriate journal, such as one on pharmacology or laboratory methods. ¹⁸ The reader's educational needs are worth understanding, whether the readers are primary-care physicians or specialists, surgeons or internists, basic or applied scientists, policymakers or third-party payers, or readers in different regions of the world or who do not speak English. ¹⁹ Once the writer has determined how the study advances the science on its topic, the next step is to determine which journals' readers might benefit from reading the paper and, if the study is not entirely unique, which journals' readers might find it of interest anyway. ²⁰

In inflammatory bowel disease, society-affiliated journals published most randomised controlled trials, including most negative ones, in one exploratory analysis of journal attributes by trial outcome. ^{21, 22, 23} It covered primary analyses of phase 2–4 pharmaceutical interventional trials in Crohn disease, ulcerative colitis or inflammatory bowel disease found in PubMed between 1 June 2015 and 24 August 2022. ²⁴ Of 1038 publications, 138 were such trials, in 35 journals. ²² Most (83/138, 60.1%) appeared in society-affiliated journals (n=19). ²² Thirty reported negative results; most of those (22/30, 73.3%) were in society-affiliated journals, and nearly half (13/30, 43.3%) in just two journals, with impact factors of 10.0 (n=7) and 22.7 (n=6). ²² Most trials in non-society-affiliated journals were positive (45/55, 81.8%; 13 journals), and "all except for one non-society-affiliated journal published a single negative RCT". ²² Of the 30 negative trials, 63.3% were open access, and 14, 10 and 6 reported phase 2, 3 and 4 trials. ²² The authors read the results as suggesting that society-affiliated journals in the field publish more trials, negative ones included, than non-society-affiliated or general medicine journals, which may bear on the choice of target journal for such data. ²³ Because only inflammatory bowel disease trials were assessed, the significance for other therapy areas is unknown. ²³

What drives the choice of journal

Reputation, readership and impact factor were the three leading reasons authors gave for submitting to Mayo Clinic Proceedings in its 2009 user survey, chosen by 69% (149 of 217), 62% (133 of 214) and 52% (111 of 214); the question allowed several answers and also offered the quality of the final print and online product, the service provided by editorial office staff, and processing turnaround time. ^{25, 26, 27}

Researchers in the early drug development programmes of a biotech company regarded the impact factor as the most important consideration in choosing a journal, followed by immediate and open access. ^{28, 29, 30} In a survey published in 2022, 31 of those researchers in the preclinical and early-phase programmes of a biotech company ranked ten factors for selecting a journal: 17 put the impact factor first or second, followed by immediate access without a paywall (9), open access (8), rapid online access (7), CiteScore (4), tracked altmetrics and reported citation indices (3 each), social media presence (2), patient involvement (1) and the option to include enhancements (none). ^{28, 31, 29}

In industry-sponsored publishing, medical writers and publications managers both value listing on PubMed most, but publication lead times are more likely to influence managers' preferences than writers'. ³² A survey distributed through publication-professional and medical writing channels drew 163 respondents, of whom 53 were medical writers, 72% of them working for medical communications agencies, and 42 were publications managers, 69% of them in pharmaceutical or biotechnology companies. ³² Listing on PubMed was valued by 98% of writers and 91% of managers, and short publication lead time by 71% of managers but 49% of writers. ³² The principal factors deterring respondents from considering a journal were high publication charges (writers 11%, managers 10%) and creative commons licences (8% and 12%). ³²

One experienced publication writer sets the medical writer's aim as getting a study's report published in the highest-impact, PubMed/MEDLINE-indexed, peer-reviewed journal of first choice, ideally one with open access and other reader and author amenities. ³³

Drawing up a shortlist

Less experienced writers often jump straight to the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA or the BMJ, but those journals accept very few articles against the number submitted or published across all journals, and an article earns a place there only if it is outstanding, often representing deep research or extensive clinical experience. ⁶ Most often an author is left choosing a second, third or later option. ⁶ Publication prospects call for realism, and expectations about them call for proactive management, for example at the kickoff meeting. ¹⁹ No one has a magic formula for the choice, but one experienced writer suggests four steps. ⁶

1. Study the article carefully, not just its title, and categorise it specifically. Cardiology is usually not enough: asking whether it is clinical, invasive or electrophysiological cardiology narrows the prospects, and research calls for a journal that seems to specialise in research, as clinical material does for clinical.
2. Decide from the scope of the material whether it suits a general or a specific journal, and whether a national, state or local title is preferred or offers a better chance.
3. List the possible journals in the approximate order of likely acceptance.
4. Obtain copies of the top three or four, review the instructions to authors that appear in almost every journal, match them against the article, and pick the journal most likely to publish it.

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One writer prepares a long list of potential journals and winnows it with his own, admittedly old-school statistical-mode approach: examine the bibliography of the outline or manuscript and consider submitting to the journal, or one of the three journals, cited most frequently there, especially where it meets the other requirements. ^{34, 19} Commercial web portals such as PubsHub give key parameters of thousands of journals, such as the impact factor and the time from submission to publication. ³⁴ An example long list, for a brief report on adherence to an oral antidiabetic drug and drawn from PubsHub in February 2018, sets each journal's impact factor, circulation, acceptance rate, time from submission to publication or posting ahead of print, and whether and within what limits of words, references and displays it publishes brief reports side by side. ^{35, 36, 37, 38} Across its journals, impact factors ran from 1.381 to 15.745, acceptance rates from 13% to 67% and times from submission to publication from 4 to 41 weeks, circulation was given variously as print copies, downloads, monthly visits or monthly users, and several journals published no brief reports. ^{35, 36, 37, 38}

Sylogent's databases organise conference and journal information. ³⁹ In 2016 its Journal Selector, updated regularly, gave each journal a detailed record, including its therapeutic area, aims and scope, audience, languages and circulation, such as a circulation of 40,648, 71% of it in North America, for The Journal of Neuroscience. ^{39, 40, 41, 42} It required a subscription and allowed quick comparisons of journals that saved the time web research would otherwise take, and a review of the databases medical writers used judged it ideal for planning article submissions and essential for writers who do publication planning. ^{39, 40}

A journal locator helps find journals that might fit a proposed manuscript: Genamics JournalSeek covered over 94,000 categorised titles in 2008. ⁴³

JANE (Journal/Author Name Estimator) is a free tool that searches for target journals from the content of a manuscript's title or abstract and generates a ranked list of possible journals. ^{44, 45, 1} It takes a pasted title or abstract, with an option to scramble the words automatically for confidentiality, searches virtually all journals in MEDLINE, and lists each potentially relevant journal with its eigenfactor, a type of impact factor, indicating whether the journal is open access or archived in PubMed Central. ⁴⁵ The same method, or a keyword search, finds relevant articles to cite and identifies the top experts on a subject, as a journal choosing reviewers needs. ⁴⁵ One writer who tried it judged that careful follow-up research is still needed, but that pasting into the search box is good for thinking outside the box about possible journals. ⁴⁵ Another tested it with a made-up title on vanilla extract reducing the frequency and severity of migraine headaches: JANE ranked Headache first, with Neurology and The Clinical Journal of Pain high on the list and The Journal of Headache and Pain, tagged as open access, further down. ¹

A reference manager can also propose candidates: EndNote's Manuscript Matcher, as shown in 2021, takes a draft's title, abstract and already-inserted citations and proposes journals from the abstract's keywords, from where the cited works were published, and from where those works' own references were published. ^{46, 47} Each candidate comes with its impact factor for the current year and the previous five, an expandable account of how well the keywords fit, similar articles that can be opened, and a route straight into submission. ^{47, 48}

In 2024 one medical writer found that whether ChatGPT's journal suggestions help depends on what it is asked: an uploaded article with a request for journal suggestions was not very helpful, while the most effective phrasing he found calls on its training data, as in "please use your training data, and identify journals whose scope matches the content of my report". ^{49, 50} He found ChatGPT more helpful than the tools the publishing houses offer, which had not helped him much. ⁵⁰

Fit with the journal

A writer should note how often the journal publishes papers similar to theirs and what topics it generally presents. ^{1, 19} If a journal has published nothing on a topic over the past few years, this can mean either that its editor considers the topic outside the journal's scope, or that the editor has received no useful submissions on it and would welcome a paper. ¹ The writer should also find out what topics are important to the editors. ²

Journals differ in the article formats they publish: some accept almost no articles that are not research reports, others limit themselves to review articles, some publish case reports and others never do, and some carry invited editorials while in others only the editor writes the editorials. ⁵¹ Scanning several recent issues helps show which article formats a journal publishes, and also the scope of its topics, its usual writing style and who publishes in it. ⁵¹ A journal's instructions for authors will probably describe the types of articles it publishes, with some guidelines for preparing each. ⁵¹ For almost all journals, both the table of contents of recent issues and the instructions for authors are available online. ⁵¹

A common reason for rejection is that a submission is not sufficiently original or not within the journal's aims and scope, and most of the journal's readers would likely not be interested in it. ⁵² To avoid such a rejection, and to see whether the journal publishes papers like theirs, the writer reviews the journal's aims and scope, its author guidelines and its online content, and downloads recent content, especially reports of studies with designs like their own. ^{52, 53, 19} The study's design deserves particular attention: some journals will not publish certain designs, such as open-label studies or post hoc subgroup analyses, or publish them much less often, and some publish only reports of systematic reviews, meta-analyses and randomised controlled trials, and not manuscripts reporting subgroup analyses, open-label studies or observational research. ^{19, 52}

Redundancy is another major reason for rejection: a journal may reject a manuscript if it is about to publish, or has recently published, a similar one, and reviewing its recent online content can help rule this out. ⁵² Where a small number of potential journals are already targeted, their online content from the last three to five years, and articles posted ahead of print, are reviewed to ensure that a similar study has not been published recently. ²⁰ A journal that has recently published a similar article might still consider a report on a similar topic if it adds a new dimension to the existing literature, such as a larger or more diverse sample population, or a statistical refinement such as propensity score matching in an observational study. ⁵² Journal advertisements about future planned content should be examined, because the manuscript might fit an upcoming special issue. ⁵²

Checking a candidate's audience, impact, costs and format

When a paper is rejected, one writer recommends choosing the next journal on several factors, all found on a journal's website: the audience, the impact, the time from submission to publication, the costs, and whether the journal is print, electronic or both. ^{54, 55} Half an hour spent now finding the right journal can save months later on. ⁴⁴

Audience size can be read from circulation information on the journal's website or in subscription databases such as Ulrich's Periodicals Directory and PubsHub. ⁵⁶ Also worth considering are whether the journal is freely accessible, giving a bigger audience, or fee-based, giving a smaller one, and whether it is indexed in the most common databases, such as MEDLINE. ⁵⁶ One measure of a journal's reputation is its impact factor, and the Eigenfactor and the SCImago Journal Rank are others. ⁵⁷ Journal Citation Reports, SciVerse Scopus and PubsHub each allow side-by-side comparison of journal statistics such as the impact factor and the Eigenfactor, and all three are generally subscription services. ⁴⁴

The writer should check what a journal charges the author, if anything, and whether the cost is worth it: some journals charge submission or publication fees, and many charge to publish colour figures. ⁵⁸

Electronic-only publication brings lower costs, a shorter time from acceptance to publication, fewer restrictions on length and on the number of figures and tables, and a better chance of accommodating supplementary material such as video. ⁴⁴ Against that, the paper is not immediately accessible to readers of any print version, and there is the question of what happens to it if the journal folds. ⁴⁴ At least for papers indexed in MEDLINE, the journal is required to have an arrangement for preserving its content and allowing access to it in the event of its demise. ⁴⁴ The writer also determines the media through which to reach the intended readers: print, electronic or some combination of both. ¹⁹

Journals with a higher impact factor generally also have lower acceptance rates, so choosing among them means balancing a journal's perceived importance against the possibility that it accepts the article. ⁵⁹ The balance matters especially with authors from academia, for whom the impact factor is a huge matter for their career and who always want to publish in high-impact journals, though those are not always the better journals for sharing the work. ^{59, 60} The benefit–risk calculus of journal selection and its wider-ranging and longer-term implications are worth considering, such as the consequences of publishing a paper rapidly, through a costly per-page expedited process, in a lower-impact journal, compared with a society journal with a higher impact factor that rejects a higher proportion of papers and may take several months rather than weeks. ¹⁹

A professional society's journal raises its own questions: whether it can carry the paper to a desired, influential readership, such as a vanguard of key-opinion-leader clinician-educators, and whether to sync publication and dissemination with an upcoming congress of the society. ¹⁹ So does whether the journal publishes theme issues, supplements such as single-sponsored satellite symposium proceedings, and supplementary online appendices for findings that cannot be included in the main report. ¹⁹

The pivotal publication data worth aggregating and sharing with the author team include circulation, open access where available, impact factor, rejection rate, geographical distribution, individual or institutional subscriptions, and the time from submission to acceptance, posting or publication, including any expedited publication options and their per-page charges, along with any other charges, such as for colour illustrations and open access. ¹⁹ Also worth reviewing and sharing with the author team or publication committee are the journal processes that might influence how the manuscript is prepared: the need for independent statistical review, receptivity to transparently disclosed industry sponsorship and to transparently disclosed assistance from medical writers and other supportive professionals, and receptivity to previewing a blinded abstract. ⁶¹ The journal's author guidelines and its recent online content related to the paper are reviewed carefully and distributed to the author team or publication committee, including any quality-control checklist, the author disclosures needed, and the limits on words, figures and tables, and references. ⁶¹

Time to publication

Lead times include the time from submission to initial decision and the time from acceptance to publication, and they are worth finding out where results need to be disseminated quickly. ⁶² PubsHub, a subscription database, is a comprehensive source of them, and the journal itself is another, since many journals print the dates of submission, acceptance and publication at the head of each article, from which an average can be computed. ^{62, 56} Where the aim is fast disclosure of the data, an open-access journal may serve. ⁶⁰ Most such journals update their acceptance rates automatically on their websites. ⁶⁰

The time from submission to publication should be estimated, although a precise estimate is difficult. ⁶³ It depends on the time from submission to the completion of peer review, the time the authors and the writer then need to answer the editor's and the reviewers' comments, the time the reviewers and editor need to consider those answers, and the number of cycles needed, which sometimes makes a feasible estimate difficult. ⁶⁴ After acceptance, publication in an open-access journal is normally immediate or follows within a few hours, the article being in theory available to readers as soon as it is accepted, while in a traditional journal the gap can sometimes be very long, running to several months. ^{64, 63, 60}

Presubmission inquiries

A presubmission inquiry is a means of determining whether a journal is a good fit for a paper. ⁵ The most direct and effective way to limit rejection for redundancy is to send the journal's editorial office a blinded abstract, to gauge its interest in a full submission and so avoid a prima facie rejection. ^{52, 53} In such a blinded inquiry, the abstract goes to the journal's managing or other production editor, may derive from a congress presentation, and leaves out the author, sponsor and medication names, with NAME OF DRUG in place of the drug's actual name. ⁶¹ The author guidelines should be consulted first, because some journals do not allow presubmission inquiries. ⁶¹ A writer who sees a need for a review paper and has a good idea for one should contact the editor of the chosen journal to find out whether the publishers are interested before embarking on extensive work. ⁴

A careful reading of the instructions for authors may show how to get an early opinion from the editorial staff. ⁶⁵ The New England Journal of Medicine, for example, offered a presubmission inquiry and fast track, in which an author sent a summary through its Rapid Review request form and could expect a reply within 36 hours. ⁶⁵ A manuscript taken into Rapid Review would receive a decision on publication within two to three weeks. ⁶⁵ A Rapid Review guaranteed neither acceptance nor rapid release of an accepted paper, and the journal made each of these decisions separately. ⁶⁵

One publication planner thinks it good for the lead author to send a presubmission inquiry, because the lead author can speak professional to professional with the editor and has the results to hand if anything is asked. ⁶⁶ Many medical writers, though, email editors with presubmission inquiries themselves. ⁶⁶ In that planner's experience, editors very rarely reply with a definite yes or no, and the usual reply is that the journal will consider the manuscript if it is submitted. ^{66, 67}

In another practitioner's experience, a reply can also say that the journal is not the right one and name a better-fitting journal from the same publisher. ⁶⁷ Such a suggestion is usually very valuable, because it normally reaches the editor of the suggested journal rather than staying in the correspondence with the first editor, and that editor normally writes to the authors. ⁶⁷ In one case the editor wrote proactively to ask when the first draft would be submitted. ^{67, 68} This practitioner, whose experience of presubmission inquiries was very good, recommends sending one especially where timelines are strict and the paper must be published fast, at least once there is an idea of the main data the article will include. ⁶⁸

A comparison of a field's journals

Publishing in a peer-reviewed journal that is widely read and highly respected is the primary goal when communicating important new study findings, and readers can expect data published in a high-quality journal to have undergone rigorous scrutiny and its conclusions to be of considerable importance to the field. ^{69, 70} Yet the vast majority of manuscripts submitted to top-ranking journals are not accepted. ⁷⁰ Rejection usually means restructuring and reformatting for an alternative journal. ⁷⁰ In the worst case a lengthy review may leave the data less novel and the context in need of substantial revision, and the further time lost rewriting could leave the article with considerably diminished impact when it eventually appears. ⁷⁰ A more appropriate initial choice of target journal avoids this. ⁷⁰

The Authors' Submission Toolkit, published by members of the pharmaceutical industry and biomedical journals, describes the key processes in identifying suitable target journals, and the important considerations include matching the focus of the study with that of the journal, assessing whether and how often the journal has published similar types of study recently, restrictions on word, figure and table counts, impact factor, rejection and acceptance rates, and the times between submission, acceptance and publication. ⁷⁰ Much of that can be gathered from journal websites, citation databases and individual publications, but gathering it is cumbersome and impracticable for each new submission, and a database of journal metrics for a field can help authors decide where to submit. ⁷⁰

One such comparison, of journals publishing original research on vaccines against human infectious diseases, was built as follows. ^{69, 71}

1. A PubMed advanced search over 2006–2010 retrieved English-language original research on the subject, excluding by publication type the comments, editorials, guidelines, interviews, news, letters, reviews, historical articles, errata, retractions and duplicate or republished articles, and using negative title filters to strip out words that merely look like the subject term.
2. The retrieved articles were sorted by journal, and journals publishing at least five articles over the most recent two years were carried forward.
3. The search was re-run per journal to estimate both the number of subject articles and the total of original research articles in that journal, so that the subject articles could be expressed as a percentage of the journal's research output.
4. Three databases supplied the citation metrics: the Journal Citation Reports impact factor, five-year impact factor and immediacy index; the Eigenfactor Article Influence score; and the SCImago Journal Rank with its cites per document.
5. A ranking filter with stated cut-offs distilled a core of higher-ranking journals that regularly publish the work.
6. The abstracts of the remaining lower-volume journals were inspected by hand to remove inappropriate articles, such as non-research articles, studies that did not actually investigate the subject, purely epidemiological studies, case studies, historical studies, opinion and surveys, and journals whose vaccine studies focused exclusively or almost exclusively on cancer, AIDS or veterinary vaccines were dropped.

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What the databases could not supply came from the journals. ⁷¹ Focus, research stage and an abridged aims-and-scope statement came from journal websites. ⁷¹ Acceptance rate, time from submission to acceptance, time from acceptance to publication and open-access status came from a short questionnaire emailed to a contact on the journal's website, with follow-up telephone calls where there was no response within a month and "not available" recorded where a journal did not respond or would not supply the figure. ⁷¹ Reported times were unified to half-week intervals by multiplying months by 4.333 and dividing days by seven, taking the median where a range was given. ⁷¹

Besides the citation metrics and survey figures, the published dataset gives each journal its open-access status, its disease focus classified as general, viral, non-viral or diseases primarily affecting tropical or developing countries, its research stage as preclinical or clinical, and an abridged statement of its aims and scope relevant to the subject. ^{71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77}

The PubMed search identified over 80 journals that had recently published vaccine-related studies, and filtering them by impact factor and by the number and percentage of vaccine-related studies published from 2006 to 2010 left a core of 32 that frequently publish them. ⁶⁹ The journals the filter left out included low-impact titles and also very high-impact ones: Nature, Science, Nature Medicine, Nature Biotechnology, PLoS Medicine, Immunity and the Journal of Experimental Medicine all publish vaccine-related studies and all fell outside the core. ⁷⁸

Across those five years an estimated 2,818,596 original research articles were published, of which about 0.5% (15,230) were vaccine-related. ⁷⁹ Thirteen journals published more than 100 vaccine-related articles in that period: Vaccine (3122), Clinical and Vaccine Immunology (287), Human Vaccines (271), Journal of Infectious Diseases (270), PLoS ONE (241), Infection and Immunity (232), Pediatric Infectious Diseases Journal (227), Journal of Virology (221), Journal of Immunology (216), Pediatrics (166), Clinical Infectious Diseases (120), PNAS USA (103) and Virology (101). ⁷⁹ The ten journals with the highest share of vaccine-related articles were Human Vaccines (77%), Vaccine (64%), Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses (23%), Clinical and Vaccine Immunology (21%), Pediatric Infectious Diseases (18%), Journal of Infectious Diseases (12%), Infection and Immunity (7%), and Clinical Infectious Diseases, FEMS Immunology and Medical Microbiology, and Microbes and Infection (6% each). ⁷⁹ Four of the top five journals by impact factor were general medical journals publishing exclusively clinical research and reported acceptance rates of 5–9%; most other journals reported 10–35%, with no specific relationship between acceptance rate and impact factor, and a small number reported 50% or higher. ⁷⁹ Average times from submission to acceptance ranged from 4 to 24 weeks and from acceptance to publication from under one week to 28 weeks, with no clear relationship to impact factor. ⁷⁹ Most journals had open-access options, meaning that readers normally pay but an author can pay a fee upfront to make the article freely available, and a small number were online-only journals publishing open access exclusively. ⁷⁹ The journals differed widely in the number and proportion of vaccine-related studies, in acceptance rates and in reported times from submission to publication. ⁷⁹

The comparison is intended only as a guide, and it has limitations. ⁷⁹ The search could not cleanly separate subject from non-subject studies, since two journals that publish nothing but vaccine studies scored 77% and 64%. ⁷⁹ Journal-reported turnaround figures can serve only as guidelines, because they are likely to vary from year to year and at different times of year, as when reviewers are hard to find in holiday seasons, and in most cases the time from submission to acceptance depends heavily on the quality of the manuscript and on how long the authors take over revisions. ⁷⁹ Acceptance rates and intervals are hard to compare between journals because most journals did not report how they calculate them, such as whether they use a mean or a median and how they define submission, acceptance and publication dates. ⁷⁹ And very new journals, having published too few articles to meet the criteria or having no impact factor yet, are absent, such as Trials in Vaccinology, dedicated to vaccine clinical trials, which the publishers of Vaccine had recently announced launching. ⁷⁹