You’ve been working on a research article or review article for months, perhaps years, and it’s time to get it ready for journal submission. You need to decide which journal would be a good home for your article. You could send the library (askus@unmc.edu, 402-559-6221) a bit of information about your article and ask us to make a list of potential target journals for you or you can search yourself by using the tools we would use!
JANE (Journal Author Name Estimator)
If you have your abstract or a couple sentences that describe your article’s topic, you can use JANE. Simply paste your text into JANE’s search box and hit the “Find Journals” button. A list of journals that have published articles on similar topics will appear. Tags indicating MEDLINE-indexing, PMC (PubMed Central) inclusion, and “High quality open access” status will appear along journal titles. Finally, an “Article Influence” score will be shown across from each title. This factor is a measure of how often an article in the journal is cited during the 5 years after its publication.
EMBASE is a standard literature database with “search result analysis” superpowers. Begin by searching EMBASE for articles on your general topic area. After the results appear, you may want to open EMBASE’s “Publication Type” and/or “Study Type” analyses (in the column to the left of the search results). You can select the publication and/or study type of the article you are writing and click the “Apply” button at the top of the column. This step is especially helpful if you’ve written a review article or a case report as many journals do not publish these article types. After the search results appear, click on the “Journal Titles” section of the left-hand column. You will see a list of journals that have published the articles retrieved by the search. The journals will be listed in order of the number of search results that have appeared in the journal (most to least). An export link under the list makes it possible to export the entire list. After you have a list of journals of interest, you can use Journal Citation Reports to look up each journal’s Impact Factor (a measure of the number of citations a journal’s articles have received).