How to choose a journal?
Choosing the journal might be one of the key moments for researchers. It is highly important to choose the journal wisely in order to improve your reputation, career progression and to become recognized. Although you may prepare a high-quality research paper, your research may remain unnoticed and never reach its potential if you make the wrong choice of journal for publication. That negatively affects career development and progression, obtaining grants, etc. Therefore, we prepared a short guide on how to choose a journal.
Tips:
- Make sure that your paper is within the journal’s scope
- Check out the journal’s reputation and credentials
- Browse their website
- Check the tools and services offered to authors
How to assess the journal’s reputation?
The reputation of the journal is not merely defined by journal metrics, but also the other aspects such as: citations (checked on the Web of Science, Scopus), visibility (downloads, visits, social media), peer-review process (promptness, quality), acceptance to publication time, altmetrics, additional tools and services (language editing, video articles, author summaries, video author summaries, journal’s blog, scientific networks, etc.).
Before you choose the journal, make sure it has high standards of publication and peer-review ethics. Think.Check.Submit is a campaign recently launched for this purpose. On their website, you can find a useful checklist that will help you assess the credentials of the journal you choose. Furthermore, the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) has also provided some guidelines for researchers, academic institutions, editors, funders and other stakeholders, to distinguish predatory journals from legitimate journals.
Browse the journal’s website and study the contents they publish, as well as the tools and services they offer to authors.
Extra tip: Once you choose the journal for your publication, follow the guidelines for authors very carefully. That way, you will improve your chances for paper acceptance.
What does the BJBMS offer?
Broad readership and scope. The BJBMS reaches readers across a wide range of medical disciplines and sectors. The journal publishes basic and translational/clinical research submissions and reviews in all biomedical specialties, including Genetics and Molecular biology, Immunology, Microbiology, Pathology, Biochemistry, Pharmacology, Anatomy, Biomaterials, new and emerging research and diagnostic methods, new and emerging medical entities, and others.
Open access. All research is available to the public for free. The BJBMS deposits published articles in PubMed Central, which satisfies the NIH Public Access Policy and other similar funding agency requirements.
Editorial Board. Renowned international experts in the journal’s Editorial Board, together with external peer-reviewers, select the best submissions for publication.
High visibility. Open Access: articles are freely available to readers immediately after publication; highly accessed online content: more than 200,000 visitors/month (70,000 at PubMed Central (December 2020); 50,000 at Journal’s website (November 2020); more than 80,000 at Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, and others); newsletters: more than 20,000 registered users receive a newsletter tailored to their field of interest; social media: articles are promoted through various social media channels (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook); advanced online: all accepted articles are published Advanced online and Ahead of print on PubMed within 3 days of acceptance, with citable DOIs, to make the article accessible as fast as possible; print circulation: 300 copies of print issues are sent to major libraries, institutes, universities, conferences, and subscribers worldwide. Get the free sample copy here; BJBMS Viewpoints: Journal’s blog that promotes authors and their research by publishing plain language summaries for a wide audience and media, video author summaries, as well as commentaries, interviews, news, and stories related to science and research.
Indexing and abstracting. SCIE (Science Citation Index Expanded), Web of Science, Clarivate Analytics; JCR (Journal Citation Reports®), Clarivate Analytics; PubMed/MEDLINE; PubMed Central (PMC); SCOPUS; SJR (Scimago Journal and Country Rank); DOAJ; SCILIT; EBSCO; PROQUEST; Dimensions; Semantic Scholar; Google Scholar; EMBASE/Excerpta Medica; Europe PubMed Central; Medscape; ROAD; HINARI; CAS; X-MOL; CNKI; many libraries.
Timely publication. The 2020 peer review performance metrics:
- Average time from submission to initial decision on rejection or peer review: 2 days
- Average peer-review time and decision: 19 days
- Average time from acceptance to (advanced online) publication: 3 days
- Rejections without peer review: 40%
- Acceptance Rate: 20%
Meaningful metrics. The success of the articles published in BJBMS is tracked in real-time by individualized Article-Level Metrics (Dimensions and PlumX). These reflect the viewership, download rates, social sharing, citations, field citation ratio, and relative citation ratio for each published article in real-time, and help you illustrate the impact of your research.
Journal Impact Factor® (JCR/Clarivate Analytics). 2020 calculated estimate* = 3.10. Journal Impact Factor estimate is calculated based on the number of citations in 2020 (Web of Science Core Collection), received for the papers published 2018-2019, divided by the number of articles published 2018-2019.
CiteScore® (SCOPUS/Elsevier). 2020 = 4.00. Check the latest CiteScore
Read more about the BJBMS.
Editor: Edna Skopljak, MD
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