With a journal selecting tool you use the title and abstract of your manuscript to match suitable journals. This is a compliment to other ways to identify journals and is by no means a comprehensive method. The method that these tools use is based on text mining and they use statistical algorithms to match title and abstract with articles indexed in the database of the journal selector and thus present suitable journals. You should keep in mind that journal selectors can be publisher-independent or publisher-specific tools, which means that the journals that are presented to you as possible candidates are taken from several different publishers or restricted to those that belong to the selection of journals of the publisher. When you have found one or several potential journals the next step is to analyze them closer (see step 3. Analyze the journals).
A Japanese company that offers support to researchers has created this journal selector that can match your abstract or keywords against over 28,000 journals from publishers such as Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons, Nature Publishing Group, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and more. You can also limit the selection to only journals indexed in Web of Science, to those that are open access, or those that offer open access possibilities. Any Impact Factors (Web of Science) are displayed in the search results.
JANE is managed by BioSemantics Group at the Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. It is based on journals that are indexed in Medline. You enter the title and/or abstract of your manuscript and you can also limit your search (Extra options) to language, article types (for example case reports, clinical trial, meta-analysis, review, twin study etc.), open access journals, and if the journals should be included in PubMed Central (PMC) which is an open-access archive at the National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM).
JournalGuide has been developed and is managed by software developers, former researchers, and scholarly publisher veterans. The resource is financed by Research Square, Under the tab Paper Match, you can paste the title and abstract of your manuscript and get suggestions for journals in which to publish. Even though the content covers journals in all kinds of disciplines, the most complete coverage is in biomedicine. In the search list, you will get quick information about the following aspects:
Manuscript Matcher – Web of Science/EndNote online (subscribed resource)
If you are a member of staff at Jönköping University you will have access to EndNote online (besides having access to the desktop version as well). In EndNote Online there is a function called Manuscript Matcher with which you can type or paste your manuscript title and abstract to find matching journals. The Manuscript Matcher matches journals indexed in Web of Science Core Collection (Science Citation Index, Social Science Citation Index, Arts & Humanities Citation Index, and Emerging Sources Citation Index).
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Find the right journals with Manuscript Match [2:46]
Researcher.Life is an expert editing platform for researchers and has a premium service. But the journal recommendation tool is free. You enter the abstract of your manuscript and you will be presented with a list of journals, each one with an additional journal report including more information.
Publisher-specific Tools
Elsevier is a large commercial publisher with over 2,500 journals. You enter the title and abstract of your manuscript, and you can limit the search to specific subjects and/or journals that offer open access possibilities.
IEEE Publication Recommender (free resource)
The IEEE Publication Recommender is managed by IEEE and designed to help authors find an IEEE periodical or an IEEE conference to which to submit a manuscript. You can paste keywords, manuscript title, abstract text, or upload the full article. You can choose to search for only periodicals or only conferences, or both (default setting). You will be presented with tables with suggestions for periodical and/or conferences. You can sort the search list further by relevance, title (alphabetical), Impact Factor, and submission-to-publication time.
Taylor & Francis Journal Suggester (free resource)
Taylor & Francis is a large commercial publisher with over 2,400 journals. In addition to the search itself, there is an FAQ. You enter the abstract of your manuscript.
Wiley journal matcher (free resource)
Wiley is a large commercial publisher with over 1,400 journals. You enter the title and abstract of your manuscript and you can limit the search to specific subjects and/or journals that offer open access possibilities.
