Resource of the Week #121: An Aid to Identifying Journals for Submission

Hello again. This week’s resource was mentioned by a graduate student taking a course from me this summer. It can help some researchers identify journals that are appropriate for publishing their research.

The resource is named Jane, for Journal/Author Name Estimator. On the Jane website, researchers can insert the title, abstract, or keywords of their paper. Jane then generates a list of journals that might be suitable.

For some of the journals, Jane lists an Article Influence number. This number reflects both how much articles in the journal tend to be cited and where they tend to be cited. In addition, Jane indicates which of the listed journals are open access.

Of course, using Jane is just a start. Before deciding whether a journal is suitable, one also should look at the journal’s instructions to authors and some papers in the journal.

Jane is a project of the Biosemantics Group, with funding from the Netherlands Bioinformatics Centre. It is based on MEDLINE and so is mainly for biomedical journals.

Do you know of such resources for choosing journals in other fields? If so, please post a comment.

Until the next post—

Barbara