Choosing the right journal to submit your paper to for publication is often challenging, and involves a variety of factors. In this chapter, we discuss factors you need to consider in selecting the best publication outlet for your submission, including the fit of the article to the journal, the reputation of the journal, the journal readership, and turnaround times and rejection rates. There is no one journal choice that is best for all psychology papers, but rather the best choice will often depend on the paper, your current situation, and other issues that are specific to each submission.
Introduction
The choice of a journal outlet is almost as important as the content of your paper and how you write it. Although there are many channels to share your work such as through talks, workshops, website discussion groups, and academic-idea exchange sites (and yes, even tweets), journals remain the coin of the realm for scholarly dissemination. Journals often give the broadest distribution of your ideas, along with greater methodological detail, and have the advantage of guaranteeing access for many decades into the future. Moreover, the process of peer review in journals can lead to work that has greater clarity and rigor. However, there are a large number of journals available and the choice of which journal to send your work to can be challenging. In selecting the right journal for your paper, there are several characteristics we encourage researchers to consider:
fit of the article to the journal
reputation and quality of the journal
academic readership and beyond
turnaround time and rejection rate
Apart from characteristics of the journal, there are also personal factors that you might consider when weighing these different characteristics. These include career stage, evaluation window, and opportunity costs in pursuing other papers or projects. We elaborate on the four journal characteristics for consideration followed by relevant personal factors.
Fit with Journal
The fit of an article with the journal is important and you should consider whether the findings, perspective, and style of writing squares with what the journal typically publishes. There are a few types of journals: review journals (e.g., Psychological Bulletin), opinion and perspectives journals (e.g., Perspectives on Psychological Science), study-reporting journals (e.g., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology; Psychological Science), theory journals (e.g., Psychological Review), and methodology journals (e.g., Psychological Methods). Determining beforehand whether the type of paper you have will fit the broad theme of the journal will increase the chance that the journal will consider your paper. If you do not know much about the journal, you can typically find information online, such as the “Description” and “Aims and Scope” of a journal.
Beyond the type of journal you may also want to think about the (breadth of) topics published in the journal. For example, Psychological Science publishes papers on a number of topics, including those in social psychology and cognitive psychology. However, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology does not usually publish articles in cognitive psychology. You can glean this information from reading the description of the journal and reading the titles and abstracts of recent articles. This is a relatively quick way of finding out if your paper is similar enough to those published to be accepted in the journal of your choice.
Another dimension of fit with a journal that you will want to consider is the style of journal writing and reporting. This dimension includes a variety of aspects, including writing style, length of article, number of studies, number of references, length and detail of methods, and reporting of results. Some journals are willing to consider longer introductions and discussions with multiple studies, whereas others might only consider short articles within a word limit. Even within a journal, there may be options for full-length manuscripts and short-report formats. You should select a journal that fits your style of writing and reporting. More often than not, however, you will need to edit the paper to fit the style and requirements of the journal. With this in mind, you will have to weigh the opportunity costs of submitting to a journal based on the amount of editing and rewriting needed to have it considered. For example, if you have a long manuscript with multiple studies, it may be easier to edit it for a journal like Journal of Personality and Social Psychology than Psychological Science, due to the latter's word-length limits.
Another consideration of fit with a journal is the quality and rigor of the types of papers published. Some journals desire work that is more methodologically rigorous, with watertight inferences and conclusions. Other journals are open to more exploratory papers, or papers proposing novel ideas that may have slightly less rigor. It is helpful to recognize whether the work fits a journal's expectation for quality or rigor. We recommend that you find more senior colleagues to provide feedback on the appropriateness of the work for a journal or other journals that you may not have considered.
The idea of fit is constantly evolving over time. We encourage you to keep up to date by regularly reading articles from journals – especially those you are interested in publishing in – to get a sense of the style of papers they publish and the way they are currently written. The types of papers published 20 years ago (which you might have read in a graduate class) are likely quite different from the types of papers published now. Keeping up with journals also provides potential opportunities to receive insights from the editors. During their term, journal editors chart a course for the direction of the journal. Often a new editor will describe the types of articles that are desired by the editorial staff, additional themes that the journal might consider, and changing journal policy toward certain types of papers (e.g., whether to accept replication studies). Finally, you can be on the lookout for calls for proposals or special-issue topics that coincide with what you are working on. These special issue topics often have a higher acceptance rate than regular submissions. For example, there was a call for proposals on a topic that one of us (Tay) was interested in and he ended up submitting two different papers that were reviewed by two separate action editors. They independently accepted the papers, which resulted in an interesting special issue with two papers published by the same lead author.
Reputation and Quality of Journal
In general, it is preferable to publish in journals that have a higher reputation. There are several sources often used to determine the reputation and quality of a journal. From a sociology of science perspective, the psychology community has established certain norms and processes to recognize journal quality and senior members in the field have a good understanding of this information. Seasoned scholars can tell you which are the “A,” “B,” and “C” journals. One journal may be called “cutting-edge,” the next called “solid,” and the third labelled a “back-up.” Some consider the journals below “C” to be “trashy,” but they can have the purpose of publishing failures to replicate, descriptive statistics on a population, and other data that the authors believe are worth disseminating even if they are not cutting-edge findings. This is becoming an increasingly important issue in order to ensure that novel cutting-edge findings are replicable and trustworthy.
Often the top psychology journals are associated with highly respected societies, such as the Association for Psychological Science and the American Psychological Association. We encourage you to approach mentors and advisors on this issue, as they are good sources of information about respected journals. You often will want to aim for the ones with stronger reputations, as these journals are commonly perceived to be of higher quality and likely will count more toward getting a job or receiving a promotion. However, at times, you might select a less prestigious journal that is likely to accept your paper simply to get it out and move to new projects, or because you can disseminate the data more quickly this way.
With the advent of bibliometrics, more psychologists are now turning toward objective metrics as a proxy for journal reputation. Among these metrics is the journal impact factor, which is a frequently used index of reputation and represents the per capita citation of a journal article. In particular, many journal editors monitor the yearly journal impact factor, which is calculated based on the total number of citations over the last two years divided by the total number of articles published over the last two years. A high yearly journal impact factor demonstrates that other scholars are paying attention to the articles published there and citing them in their own work.
Although the impact factor can correspond to the reputation of a journal, many academics now realize the shortcoming of this metric. For one, the impact factor is often confounded with the type of articles a journal usually publishes. Review-type journals tend to have a higher impact factor than journals that publish single-study papers. Moreover, some methodological journals that have high prestige like Psychometrika tend to have low impact factors due to the technical nature of the papers. Perhaps the largest shortcoming of the impact factor is that it is skewed by a few, very highly cited journal articles that are not representative of the frequency at which most articles are cited. There are other limitations to the impact factor as well. For example, new journals might not yet have a metric, scholarly fields differ in size and therefore in citation counts, and editors can “game” the impact factor by encouraging self-citations or pre-publishing papers online first to obtain citations before articles are published on hard copy. Given that the citation count of your article will ultimately be more important than the citation count of the journal where you publish it, it is helpful not to be too focused on journal impact factors. Instead, it may be more helpful to think about journal readership.
Journal Readership and Beyond
One of the goals of academic journal publishing is to disseminate one's research or opinions to enhance the field of psychology. Therefore, it is important to also consider who may have access to, and read, the journal. With regard to readership, you will want to first think about the breadth of the journal readership. More established journals tend to have larger academic readerships and subscriptions from libraries, which provides access to other scholars. While the size of readership matters, it is sometimes better to have a more focused readership that is specifically interested in the topic of your paper. As such, more specialized journals with smaller readership may actually lead to greater attention, adoption, and citations of your paper because readers care more about the work. Apart from the size and interest of the readership, some journals are also more academic as opposed to practice oriented. If you are interested in making an impact on practice and policy, you may want to publish your work in a place read by people beyond academics. For example, organizational researchers may wish to share the latest findings in Harvard Business Review, which has a strong readership among global business leaders.
Another critical part of readership is the ease of access to the journal article itself. One possible consideration – but a limited consideration in our view – is whether a journal is open access. Open access journals can potentially reach a larger audience because they allow any member of the academic community and general public to easily download the article. However, it is easy now to share research through websites, emails, listservs, social media, and research platforms which make publishing in open access journals less critical than they once were. Further, many traditional journals now offer the option to pay an additional fee to make your paper open access.
Another possible consideration is whether a journal has a strong media team to support authors in communicating their research to the news media and general public. Some journals have a very active media team, which increases the reach of your paper. That said, if your paper contributes to the field and is well done, it is likely that it will eventually be shared and disseminated. Thus, the factors above may help to accelerate that process, but they are less of a guarantee than a platinum publication.
Turnaround Time and Rejection Rates
With the ever-increasing pace and pressure to publish, a significant factor to consider is journal turnaround time, from first submission to publication. Different journals vary substantially on this factor. Despite the pressure to publish, the slow turnaround times from when a paper is submitted to when it finally appears in print can surprise and shock young scholars – the periods can require several years! This slowness has become one of the big aggravations in the “publishing game.” Another surprise and aggravation for young professionals is the extremely high rejection rates of many top journals – rates even exceeding 90 percent! When these rejection rates are combined with slow turnaround times, the process can become very frustrating and stressful. Please be forewarned and know what to expect!
Turnaround time.
There are a number of ways that one can learn about turnaround time, which come in three forms. The first turnaround time is from submission of the paper to the time when the first decision letter arrives. The second turnaround time depends on the number and scope of revisions that characterize a journal and a particular editor, and whether the revisions will necessarily require more outside reviews. The third type of turnaround has to do with the queue of accepted papers at a journal, or how long it typically takes a paper to appear in print after being accepted. With the online-first publication process, this last turnaround time has become less important because most journals have a mechanism for the electronic publication of articles before they appear in print.
A few journals report their turnaround times, although this has become much rarer. Based on our experiences from being on editorial boards of psychology journals, the average turnaround time from first submission to first decision varies from about two months to over six months. Nowadays, to be competitive, journal editors are working hard to speed up turnaround times, but it remains difficult because it is hard to get an adequate number of timely, high-quality reviews. In the absence of published turnaround times, one can learn from the experiences of colleagues. Authors can also estimate turnaround times from the publication lag published with the paper in many journals – the time from submission to publication. However, this shows the results only for accepted articles, which might have a longer turnaround time and not take into account the articles that were desk rejected.
Examples from the second author's (Diener) submission experiences can give an idea of the range of turnaround times. With over 350 publications (and many rejections and resubmissions along the way), the best case was a paper submitted one day, accepted the next day, and appearing in print the next month. This is almost unheard of, so do not expect this!
A couple of worst-case experiences highlight how slow journal turnaround times can be. In one case we submitted a paper to a top journal, and after a year had heard nothing. Upon inquiry, it turned out the journal had failed to ever send the paper out for review! To make matters more galling, the editor blamed us for the oversight. In another case, this same high-prestige journal obtained reviews and we revised the paper according to the editor's instructions. However, the editor then got fired by the scientific organization that owned the journal, and they brought in a new editor. This new editor ignored the old editorial letter and reviews, and started the review process anew! Thus, journal submission can be frustrating. Our hope is that our bad experiences serve as contrast anchors, and make your experiences seem like all positive ones.
In contrast to our best and worst experiences is the average experience. Most editors will get back to authors with a review and editorial decision in two to six months. If the paper is not rejected, the decision will almost always be a revise-and-resubmit – an immediate acceptance of a submission “as is” is virtually nonexistent. Frequently, fairly substantial revisions are required, followed by reviews. In the next round, a set of smaller revisions are often requested, which frequently undergo editorial review only, without the input of outside reviewers. Be warned, however, that there is a lot of variation around this modal pattern.
Adding to turnaround times is the fact that many of the top journals often require papers to be revised several times. This process of revision and re-review can lengthen time to publication a great deal. Authors can learn from colleagues about the revision history of particular journals and editors. Some editors take the laissez-faire approach of “it is your paper and it is good enough,” and do not require extensive revisions. Other editors think of themselves almost as co-authors and get involved in every aspect of the paper, including even wording changes. As an example, one of us (Tay) received a word document with almost every other line edited by the editor using track changes. Editors will differ not only in turnaround time, but also in work and hassle for authors. Thus, it can be helpful to know who you are dealing with!
Rejection rates.
The rejection rates of journals vary from about 90 percent down to very few rejections, especially at “pay journals.” At the top journals in many fields, even good articles are rejected, because they are not seen as important enough, novel enough, or rigorous enough. The rejection rate of a journal is particularly important for young scholars who need publications soon because of their careers. The risk of submitting to a high-rejection rate journal is that many months might be required before one learns of a rejection. On the other hand, publishing in such journals can look impressive on a scholar's vita. The rejection rates of many journals are public, and so it is easy to consider this factor before submitting.
Desk rejections.
A feature of many top journals now is that the editor will quickly reject a significant number of articles without sending them for review. If the editor judges that the paper is very unlikely to be accepted at that journal, then he or she will reject the paper outright to save reviewer time and shorten turnaround times to authors. Although this outcome can be discouraging, the bright side is that the author is likely to receive such a rejection quickly, and therefore not have to wait months for reviews to come in. This is actually a good feature of a journal if they have quick desk rejections. Typically, desk rejection occurs in less than two weeks. Authors need to understand that a desk rejection does not mean the article is bad; it just means that the editor thinks it is not above the very high threshold of importance or relevance for this journal. In our experience, a desk rejection can be contested and formal reviews requested, but the arguments must be good for this to happen.
Reviews from other journals.
At some journals, the editor will be willing to accept the reviews from a journal that has previously rejected the paper. The idea here is that the paper might be quite good, but nevertheless rejected at an outlet with a very high rejection rate. Rather than use additional amounts of the scarce commodity of reviewer time, an editor will be willing to take a look at the former reviews and not seek new ones. Occasionally the editor might examine the old reviews and yet require one or two more. However, in some cases editors might be willing to ask for revisions without new reviews, based solely on the old reviews. It can happen that these old reviews were not that negative, but simply not enthusiastically positive enough for the first journal. Thus, journals that are willing to take a look at previous reviews of a formerly rejected paper can sometimes speed up the turnaround time considerably. Information about the use of old reviews is usually contained in the editorial statement of a journal, although editors will always reserve the right to obtain additional reviews after examining the old reviews. Given this, you may wish to include information about previous reviews in your cover letter to a journal submission to possibly speed up the review process, although this is not usually the norm.
Requesting reviewers.
In the submission letter authors can request that editors use specific reviewers who have expertise relevant to your paper. Many editors will often use a name or two from this list, although they often also seek additional reviewers. The advantage here is that you can suggest reviewers who you believe will not be biased against your work, and might even like it. You can also suggest names of people to the editor who you believe would not be good reviewers, either because of personal bias or past conflicts. It is even possible to explain why you believe the reviewer would not give a valid review. Occasionally an editor will seek the opinion of this reviewer to see what he/she has to say. At other times, if personal conflicts are involved, an editor may heed your warning and avoid the named reviewer. Suggesting names of reviewers has little downside, although it is not guaranteed that your request will be granted.
Personal Factors
While the aforementioned factors are typically considered by most scholars, they often weigh the factors differently. Understanding these factors can help you determine what aspects might be more important for you. It can also help you understand the discrepancies between your goals and the goals of your co-author. For example, in the collaborative papers between junior and senior authors, the junior author often emphasizes the need to publish in a high-prestige journal, whereas the senior author emphasizes the importance of speed and fewer hassles. Clearly, career stage is important. For psychologists who are established and well-recognized in the field, the speed of dissemination is more critical than the prestige of the journal outlet, as they do not require more prestigious publication outlets to advance their scholarly careers. However, for a young scholar seeking her/his first job or promotion to tenure, the reputation of the journal should be weighed more.
Apart from career stage, it is also critical to consider when your curriculum vita will be formally evaluated. It may be necessary to get papers out quickly if you are going on the job market soon, or being evaluated for promotion and/or tenure. You should think about the likely turnaround time for a journal and when you will need to have your materials together by for evaluation. Usually, having a paper under review does not count for much. It is certainly better to have a revision at a journal, or even better, an acceptance at a journal. With a shorter time frame, one would favor journals that have a faster turnaround time. Preferably, you should work backward from the evaluation period to give yourself plenty of time to publish your papers, but we also recognize that sometimes data collection and data analyses do not always pan out, and in that scenario, one needs to be tactical in sending it to an outlet with a solid reputation and decent turnaround times.
Trying to get your papers published is a draining process. It is not unlikely – and perhaps very likely if you are in academia long enough – that you have some papers that never seem to get through the publication process. In these instances, you may want to target journals that have a higher acceptance rate to get the paper out to the world rather than burying it in the so-called “file drawer” (or your computer file folder). It can also be motivating to move the paper off your personal revision pile in order to receive a morale boost, and more importantly, to reduce the opportunity cost of not working on new and more promising projects!
There Are Many Journals: Don't Fret
Young scholars can get caught in the trap thinking that they must get their paper accepted by a specific top journal. In fact, in our modern age of technology, your article will be seen and cited in most journals, and the quality of the article will ultimately win out. It is of course helpful for young scholars to publish in the most prestigious journals, but many of their articles can go to more focused journals and their careers can still thrive. The second author (Diener) of this chapter had one of his early papers rejected by a top journal and then accepted by a “second-tier” journal, and that publication has now been cited over 20,000 times!
In the long run your career will flourish based on the entire corpus of your contributions, and will almost never depend on being published in a specific journal. So relax, submit, and please enjoy the research itself, which is why you entered the field in the first place! Don't let rejections bother you for long, and see publishing as a challenge with which you can cope, given effort and perseverance! Keep in mind that even the most famous psychologists have received many journal rejections, and the rejections are not a reflection of your ability or worth.
