Advice on Journal Selection for Submission

[rota1234]

Hello Everyone,

I'm a junior scholar graduating this semester and on the job market. I am up for some fall positions but have yet to secure a position. I have an active and growing research agenda in my humanities field, but some publication advice would be appreciated.

As someone on the job market who wants a job that favors research, I'm not sure how to approach my dilemma:
Do I aim for the highest ranking journal that I think my current article fits, which may take 6 months or more to receive a first review and therefore will not help me for the remaining fall job market (or even for late summer application deadlines for 2022 postdocs), or should I submit to a lesser known/ranked journal with a faster turnaround time and higher chance of acceptance, which could lead to a quick CV update for the current market?

Also, is there a common method of approach for these kinds of situations at the early career stage?

[Ruralguy]

I'm not a humanist, but I would almost always aim for a fairly high level journal.

I know in the sciences there is sort of a "super high" tier, such as Nature and Science and they aren't to be submitted to casually. It won't hurt you, but it will waste time to do so unless you really are doing ground breaking stuff  (a new vaccine, a 9th major planet in the solar system, etc., new fundamental particle). I've never submitted to those because I always thought they were too high of a shot for what I was doing.
But neglecting that sort of thing, I always submit to highly regarded journals in the subfield. If that fails, I might think of something else.

But that sort of process just might not be possible in some humanities fields because the wait+ revision time is > time to next review/hire season.

[Parasaurolophus]

You need some publications, and fairly soon. But they also need to impress people, especially people who won't read them, so they need to be in some kind of top venue. So: both!

In my (humanities) field, acceptance rates are in the single digits, even for second- and some third-tier journals. And turnaround times are relatively slow, but a fair few of the topmost generalist journals are very slow. So if you were in my field (philosophy), I'd suggest a top specialist journal or a quick T12ish generalist journal.

When I was in your position, I went with top specialist journals (and had little luck when I tried generalist journals). After some success on the specialist circuit, I was able to branch out to the top generalist journals, which are the journals I haunt most these days (although I still regularly publish in the two top specialist journals in my subfield). I'm four years out now.

[Sun_Worshiper]

Don't aim low if you want a research-oriented academic job. If you don't think that your work can hit at a top journal, then go for a slightly lower venue that is still well respected (e.g. a more specialized journal, as Parasaurolophus suggests).

Also, there is no guarantee that lower tier journals will give you a faster response then a top place (at least in my experience).

[rota1234]

Thanks for the advice everyone. It is all very helpful.

It seems like I should aim for the best possible journal where my work would fit (this paper is not for a very very top tier journal) that has the quickest listed turn-around time. 

I'm going to do a bit more research on journals before I make a decision.

Thanks again everyone.

[polly_mer]

What does your advisor and/or committee say?

Why are you on the market without publications?

Who knows your work who could hype you up in the relevant places, even if the publications aren't yet in press?  If you're going for a research position, then you must have a pretty good network from your grad work and regular conference attendance, right?

[rota1234]

Polly_Mer: Just to clarify, I have publications and a pretty competitive C.V., but the job market is a monster. Also, I am a productive researcher/writer in a book field, and I have a publication pipeline.
I am somewhat networked but not to the extent that it would get me a position at this stage.
Advisors are more concerned with journal fit rather than prestige given the interdisciplinary nature of my work, but they are certainly encouraging.

[polly_mer]

Polly_Mer: Just to clarify, I have publications and a pretty competitive C.V., but the job market is a monster.

Great!  One more article added to a solid CV matters much less than trying to go from zero to one.

I am somewhat networked but not to the extent that it would get me a position at this stage.

Do people know you enough that you will make short lists?  In academia, almost no one gets a TT position by favoritism, but many people lose out on the research-intensive positions by thinking a long list of publications and presentations will make up for lack of name recognition.  After all, if people were reading those publications and attending the presentations, then they would know your name and be including you in related discussions.

The question usually isn't publication outlet so much as the right people knowing your work and accepting you as an up-and-comer in the field.

Advisors are more concerned with journal fit rather than prestige given the interdisciplinary nature of my work, but they are certainly encouraging.

Listen to your advisors. 

If your work is interdisciplinary enough, then either you're trying to join a community of people who are likewise interdisciplinary so you need to be where they are or you will need to establish yourself in multiple communities.  Either way, you need to be known to the relevant research discussion groups AND somehow translate that into being hired.

Again, having a long list of presentations and publications is not nearly as useful as having people on the committee who see your name on an application packet and think "oh, yeah, rota1234!  rota1234 is definitely someone to consider."

For non-elite teaching positions, experience is usually more important than name recognition.

For research positions at elite enough places that people generally know "everyone" in the community, not having name recognition is a problem and one more article isn't going to matter very much.

[Faith786]

As someone who faced the same dilemma up until recently, I have the following advice which you may (or may not) find helpful:

Go to Google Scholar and type in your field along with the word "journals rankings". For example, google "physics and mathematics journals rankings" should result in a list of 20 at https://scholar.google.ca/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=en&vq=phy
e.g. 1. Physical Review Letters 2. The Astrophysical Journal...20. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing

Once you have the top 20, you can select one by going either up or down the list (starting at the top and do trial by elimination) or start at  #9 Astronomy and Astrophysics, and work your way up...

There are, of course, other rankings (other than Google Scholar's).
Warning: some journals have been discontinued due to controversies but still show up high in Google scholar journal rankings, such as Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, which is a very bad journal and seeing it is very annoying.   

[Parasaurolophus]

As someone who faced the same dilemma up until recently, I have the following advice which you may (or may not) find helpful:

Go to Google Scholar and type in your field along with the word "journals rankings". For example, google "physics and mathematics journals rankings" should result in a list of 20 at https://scholar.google.ca/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=en&vq=phy
e.g. 1. Physical Review Letters 2. The Astrophysical Journal...20. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing

Once you have the top 20, you can select one by going either up or down the list (starting at the top and do trial by elimination) or start at  #9 Astronomy and Astrophysics, and work your way up...

There are, of course, other rankings (other than Google Scholar's).
Warning: some journals have been discontinued due to controversies but still show up high in Google scholar journal rankings, such as Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, which is a very bad journal and seeing it is very annoying.

I don't think that approach to rankings will work well for the humanities, since it relies on the journal's h5 index, which doesn't accurately reflect dissemination or citation practices in the humanities. The philosophy ranking (my field), for example, is just silly  (and it's broken up across several subcategories!). (For comparison, this is the generally agreed-upon ranking for generalist journals.)

[Wahoo Redux]

If you have Ebscohost through your library look up the "MLA Directory of Periodicals."  This is an index of active and sometimes inactive scholastic journals.  These entries will usually contain the average number of articles submitted and the average accepted.  And the entries will usually give you a time from submission to decision----although this is often inaccurate depending on how responsible the readers are.

The thing of it is, a great journal through Taylor and Francis and a scholarly blog at Pignuckle Community College will probably have the same 3 to 6 month turnaround, no matter what.  Few of them are fast.  And then there is the revise and resubmit.

Best of luck. 

[polly_mer]

As someone who faced the same dilemma up until recently, I have the following advice which you may (or may not) find helpful:

Go to Google Scholar and type in your field along with the word "journals rankings". For example, google "physics and mathematics journals rankings" should result in a list of 20 at https://scholar.google.ca/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=en&vq=phy
e.g. 1. Physical Review Letters 2. The Astrophysical Journal...20. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing

Once you have the top 20, you can select one by going either up or down the list (starting at the top and do trial by elimination) or start at  #9 Astronomy and Astrophysics, and work your way up...

There are, of course, other rankings (other than Google Scholar's).
Warning: some journals have been discontinued due to controversies but still show up high in Google scholar journal rankings, such as Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, which is a very bad journal and seeing it is very annoying.

I don't think that approach to rankings will work well for the humanities, since it relies on the journal's h5 index, which doesn't accurately reflect dissemination or citation practices in the humanities. The philosophy ranking (my field), for example, is just silly  (and it's broken up across several subcategories!). (For comparison, this is the generally agreed-upon ranking for generalist journals.)

This method doesn't even work for the examples Faith786 gives.  Astronomy and physics are very big fields with many, many subfields. 

Everyone in a given field knows the high prestige journals; failing to know as tribal knowledge is a severe grad school failure.  Relying on the AI rankings is silly because that's not how it works.

Someone who is interdisciplinary would need something akin to whatever it is that "everyone" publishes in for validation methods for computational studies of black holes if they aren't ready for the high prestige journals.

[Faith786]

Everyone in a given field knows the high prestige journals; failing to know as tribal knowledge is a severe grad school failure.

The severe grad school failure applies, then, to my situation...we were only taught a handful of journals to submit (<5), when in fact there were at least 20 really good ones. I had to do trial and error on my own to submit to different journals, finally finding some that I could consistently submit and have my work published, and they do show up way high in Google Scholar Journal rankings.  In peripheral fields (not my main one) I still struggle to find good journals, and rely on the Google Scholar Journal Rankings method, or just submit to one where my work was published over 10 years ago.  It has worked, so far, for me, but it may be because of field-specific context(s).

I think that the other discussion/post (about grad school prestige) makes the difference in knowing the perfect journals, too.

[Sun_Worshiper]

Looking at rankings based on citations or h-index is ok, but can be misleading since some good journals get relatively few cites and some so-so journals get a lot. In most fields people have collectively agreed on what the good journals are, so I'd look at CVs of junior folks at good schools to get a sense for where they are publishing when they don't publish in top journals.

[darkstarrynight]

I recommend looking through Ulrich's database and searching for peer-reviewed journals with your keywords. When I interviewed for my current (dream) job, I was being asked to apply for a very narrow field, and no one else in the entire college does work in my area. My field at the time had two journals where things fit, so I submitted my first dissertation article to one of them. It was published a week before my interview as my first pub (so yes, I got an interview with "potential") and was able to put the citation on the front slide of my research talk. That was enough for me to be successful here, because my field is so small, and I started contributing to the limited scholarship right away. Now, so many more journals have "popped up" in the field, some with a better reputation than others, but they are all relatively new. For P&T, I had to provide acceptance rates and impact factors (fi relevant), but to make a case, I could use information like audience (one journal gets printed and mailed to 15,000 organization members). So while I hope one day to get into a more broad, highly respected journal in a related field, those journals tend to not have interest in my focus, so those will be a stretch (though I will try)!