Choosing the Right Journal for Your Scholarly Manuscript
So, you’ve labored away at getting your scholarly manuscript just the way you want it and now you need to send it off to a journal for publication. This is where many researchers get stuck; they can’t seem to find a suitable journal. As a researcher myself, I know how hard it can be to find just the right journal.
As an academician, you should ask yourself three questions while selecting a journal. First, which journals count toward tenure or promotion? Second, do I want to publish in a general or focused journal? Third, which journals’ requirements does my manuscript meet?
Counting toward tenure or promotion
The first consideration is whether publication in the journal will count toward tenure or promotion. While some tenure/promotion committees accept any peer reviewed journal, especially those that appear in Cabell’s Directories of Academic Journals, when evaluating a researcher’s publications, some have a much narrower view of what constitutes a good journal.
If you are unsure whether publication in a journal will count toward your tenure or promotion, consult with the dean of your school or directly with a member of the respective committee. There’s no point in conducting research and then publishing it in a journal that doesn’t count. In fact, doing so may count against you because a committee might wonder why you are wasting time with an inferior journal.
General versus narrowly focused journals
Some journals cover a wider breadth of topics within a field than others do. In fact, some minute parts of a field are so specialized that they have their own journals. When choosing a journal for your scholarly manuscript, consider whether you want to publish your study in a general or narrowly focused journal.
Suppose you conducted a study on leadership and are looking for an appropriate journal. The Academy of Management Journal (AMJ) covers all aspects of management (e.g., finance, HRM, operations, and accounting), but a more focused journal such as Leadership Quarterly might be more appropriate for you needs as an academician. Narrowly focused journals typically aren’t as prestigious as those that publish manuscripts that cover many topics within a field. Still, publishing in narrowly focused journals might look better to a tenure or promotion committee because it shows that your research has continuity. Consider how focused a journal is in a field and decide which type of journal is better for your career goals.
Journal requirements
Before you conduct a study, you should create a short list of journals you would like to target when you finish your manuscript. This way, you are able to match the manuscript to the requirements of the journals you chose. If not, you need to take a careful look at what the submission/author requirements are at a target journal.
If your manuscript is 40 pages long and the journal you are considering has a page limit of 25, you have some work to do. You can try to convince the editor that the manuscript has to be its current length to do the topic justice, significantly cut the paper down to size, or look for another journal with more flexible length limits.
One researcher I know wrote a wonderful 8,000-word manuscript and later chose a journal whose length limit was 2,500 words. She asked me to copy edit the paper down to size. Instead, I suggested that she look for another journal. There was no point to losing nearly 70% of what she had written just to conform to this one journal.
We looked around for about 30 minutes and found a journal that fit both her topic and manuscript length. Be careful not to satisfice (i.e., choose the first alternative that meets the minimum requirements) when it comes to selecting a journal for your manuscript. If you need to, ask for help but never unnecessarily sell your research or manuscript short.