An eternal dilemma when wanting to publish is knowing where to submit your writing, but the good news is that there are options.
Journal Finders/Recommenders
People often like to use technology to answer their dilemmas, and the journal finders/recommenders of publishers offer a ready solution.
Journal finders/recommenders work by using the draft title, abstract or keywords that you submit (something you’re likely to have to hand if you’ve started pulling together your ideas, or presented at a conference, or drawn up a project report) to match with the title, aims, scope and past papers of their journals.
Search results can be variable and you’ll need to view the details of each journal recommended to get a better of sense of how good a match it is to your own writing. How variable? Well, as a recent example, I used a journal finder/recommender for a methodological paper on grounded theory… which resulted in recommendations including a journal on town planning?!? That said, there were some recommendations that looked promising and, once you’ve found what appears to be reasonable match, you’ll need to refer to journal’s author guidelines to confirm that this is the publication you’re going to submit to.
A quick side note, each publisher has their own journal finder/recommender which, unsurprisingly, only recommend journals that they publish, so you’ll probably need to check the sites of a variety of publishers to ensure you’re getting a representative sample of the publishing landscape.
An Alternative Approach
An alternative, and one which I find typically leads me to the same end point and is infinitely quicker, is simply to look at the references that you’ve cited in your own writing. Look for references that have been published reasonably recently and that closely align with the topic you’re writing about. Once you’ve identified a reasonable match, just as before, you’ll then need to refer to the journal’s author guidelines to confirm that it’s a good match. This approach also confirms that the journal has, at least until very recently, been interested in publishing papers on your topic area.
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