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Publishing Research - Research Guide

Where to Publish

Deciding Where to Publish

There are many factors to consider when deciding where to publish, including:

  • publisher or publication ethics
  • discipline or subject area
  • prestige or importance of publications in your subject area
  • audience and publication type - to reach the general public it may be more appropriate to publish in a nontraditional medium

Ethical Publishing

The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) states that ethical publishers and publications should have robust and well-described, publicly documented policies regarding the following core practices:

  1. Allegations of misconduct
  2. Authorship and contributorship
  3. Complaints and appeals
  4. Conflicts of interest
  5. Data and reproducibility
  6. Ethical oversight
  7. Intellectual property
  8. Publication management
  9. Peer review processes
  10. Post-publication activities

When choosing a publisher or publication, consider which of these policies are available to contributing authors.

Journal Identification Tools

General tools

Ulrich's Global Serials Directory provides detailed information about thousands of journals, including:

  • whether it is peer-reviewed
  • where it is indexed
  • the number of subscribers

This directory also provides links to the journal website for further detailed information about the journal, including instructions for authors.

You can use Ulrich’s to identify journals in a specific discipline or subject area.

Subject specific tools

Some subject areas also provide lists of relevant, high quality journals:

Publisher tools

Some of the major academic publishers also have suggestion tools which can help determine the journal that most closely fits your area of research. For example:

These journal suggestion tools use keywords from your article's title and abstract to search for relevant journal titles. Most journal suggestion tools also provide a range of impact metrics, so that you can identify highly ranked journals.

Impact Metrics

Impact metric indicators such as SCImago Journal Rank measure the exposure of published journal articles. Many researchers choose to publish in higher ranking journals within their discipline.

Scopus Sources data also provides details of journal impact metrics across subject areas.

Journal websites may include impact metric indicators or an impact factor of a journal.

Preprints or Self-archiving

In order to increase the discoverability of your research and receive feedback on your paper prior to publication, you may wish to post your paper to a preprint server or archive. This process is sometimes also referred to as self-archiving.

In academic publishing, a preprint is a version of a scholarly paper that precedes publication in a peer-reviewed academic publication. Preprints may be electronically posted for peer consideration and comment before submission for publication. The preprint is available from the preprint server for free, often as a non-typeset version.

There are differing opinions on the advantages and disadvantages of preprints. The following resources may help you to decide if posting on a preprint server is appropriate for your research:

Posting a preprint does not preclude submitting the manuscript for publication in a peer reviewed journal or the deposit of the approved for publication version of a paper in the Murdoch Research Repository.

Publishers, however, do have differing policies regarding the acceptance of preprint manuscripts for publication. Before posting your manuscript as a preprint, it is best to identify the journal or publisher where you intend to publish and determine if there is a relevant preprint policy. The following resources are useful for locating publisher or journal preprint policies:

Individual publishers and journals may provide detailed preprint policy statements on their websites, some examples are:

Some Open Access journals also encourage and host preprints before submission, an example is:

There are a variety of servers that host preprints; some are multidisciplinary, while others are discipline specific:

  • Advance - Multidisciplinary (Sage Publishing)
  • AgriRxiv - Agriculture and Allied Sciences   
  • arXiv - Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance, Statistics, Electrical Engineering, Systems Science, and Economics
  • Authorea - Multidisciplinary
  • bioRxiv - Biological and Life Sciences
  • CERN - Physics and Nuclear Science
  • ChemRxiv - Chemistry
  • Cogprints - Cognitive Sciences
  • CORE - Humanities
  • EarthArXiv - Earth Sciences   
  • ECONSTOR - Economics and Business
  • ECSarXiv - Electrochemistry   
  • engrxiv - Engineering
  • LingBuzz - Linguistics
  • MarXiv - Marine Science (archived content, submissions now closed)
  • medRxiv - Medicine and Health Sciences
  • MetaArXiv - Medicine and Health Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioural Sciences
  • OSF preprints - Multidisciplinary  
  • Preprints - Multidisciplinary
  • PsyArXiv - Psychology  
  • SocArxiv - Social Sciences
  • SportRxiv -  Sport, Exercise, Performance, and Health (archived content, submissions now closed)
  • SSOAR - Social Sciences 
  • SSRN.com - Multidisciplinary (Elsevier Publishing)
  • ViXra - Science and Mathematics
  • Zenodo - Science

Please note: You can include preprints in ARC and NHMRC grant applications, but preprints do not meet the requirements of the ARC and NHMRC Open Access policies:

Resources

Journal Guide - A free resource that allows you to identify and compare journals.

Where Should I Publish? - A library handout for researchers from the Elsevier publishing company.

How to Find the Right Journal for your Research (Using Actual Data) - a Clarivate guide for researchers.