You are a scientist who takes pride in learning about your subject matter and exploring new things. Your recent studies have presented you with are unique pattern that has the potential to change the research and development paradigm in your field significantly. Just like any other scholar, you want the knowledge to reach the right people, and your best channel of communication for this information is journal publication.
But you cannot select just any journal, after all, you want your research to reach the right people who are dealing with similar studies and would build upon this research. So, how would you do that? How can you select the right publication for your research?
The whole process of selecting your perfect research paper publication option:
Define Your Research Topic
Suppose you are a psychologist who has recently identified a link between a certain childhood behavior with adolescent tendencies to easily or difficulty nurture romantic relations. You want it to be published in a relevant journal. You will want to publish it in leading adolescence or childhood psychology journals. However, if that childhood behavior has roots in family dynamics, family studies journals will become a more suitable choice in this scenario.
So, you must narrow down the topic of your research to find the specific discipline it relates to. This understanding of the scope of your work will allow you to narrow down your research more easily.
Search Journals within the Research Scope
The best thing about this step is that you don’t have to go out of your way to find all the publications out there in the world to reach your ideal journal publication outlet. Just look at the journals you, your peers, and your mentors or professors read.
You may collect tens of journal choices for your research before you proceed to narrow them down according to the scope of your research. You will want to read the mission statement presented by these publications to understand the type of research they and their readers value most.
Assess the Authority of the Journal
You have worked hard on your research and want it to pay you off for your efforts. One way that satisfies you is that it reaches the right audiences, initiates discussion on the right forums, and gives new direction to research and development activities.
Luckily, you can impact how your research is perceived by the readers by selecting an adequate journal for your research paper publication. Look up how many successful and triggering studies this journal has conducted in the past. You will want to know the credentials of its publisher, editors, and sub-editors. An important indicator of the authority of a journal publication is its being peer-reviewed.
Just like publishers and editors, you will want to assess the expertise level of authors who publish in that journal publication. Don’t get too invested in this research as the success or lack thereof of these authors tell only a little about the journal authority. Many authors don’t publish more than a handful of papers in their lifetime. At the same time, it’s not very often that an author gains exceptional popularity because of his one or two researches.
In addition to the success of their research from the said journal or others, you will also need to look at their credential. What is their research experience? What is their profession? Note the institute with which they are affiliated.
Check Out Winning Studies
An important measure of authority of a journal is the quality of research studies it publishes. Check out the number of its successful studies from the past. Also, you will want to check the impact these studies made in the arena of academic research area.
You will want to see if they triggered major studies or if these studies or conclusions helped in technological or scientific developments or not. Many authors also take an interest in the number of citations of a scientific study to judge the impact of that study as well as the journal that published it.
Diving deep into studying these research papers may also help. So, select a few significant articles from it past few publications and give them a deep review. Consider the depth and scope of these research. Also, measure if they solve a problem or unearth a remarkably novel pattern or concept.
Check Resources
Once you have narrowed down your journal options to those publications that fulfill your scope and impact requirements, you should check if they make research paper publication easy for you. Study the publication criteria of these journals. What are their requirements for the depth and novelty of research? Do they want you to narrow down your study question a lot? For once, you will want to check if this journal is peer-reviewed or not.
The research journal should be available online and it should make your research available in its online issue to become worthy of your focus. Plus, check if this journal forwards the submitted studies to similar journals if they don’t find that the study matches their scope of publications. This will act as a huge help towards your publication journey.
It will be a huge help if you have peers who have published in that journal or know someone who has. If you can find an acquaintance, ask about the journal’s research paper publication support. A helpful and considerate editorial desk makes the publication process a lot easier.
Take Away
The obvious way to make your research available to the right masses is to publish it on the right platform. And what better platform for research paper publication than a research journal? But you wouldn’t want any journal to publish your hard-earned study conclusion. You want a journal that can attract a relevant audience for it. Use this blog post to find the best publication journal for your research paper so it reaches those people who can build upon it to make this world a better place.
