Top 5 factors for selecting a journal for scientific publications

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Selecting the right journal publishing services for your manuscript is as critical as writing a good article. The right choice goes on to make big differences; in terms of getting published or rejected; getting acknowledged by your peers; citations and popularity, etc. Today, it is advised for young professionals to engage in professional scientific editing services or medical writing services to help develop their manuscripts to be worthy of publication.

Here are the top 5 factors you must keep in mind for selecting the right journal for your publication:

1) Aim and Scope of the Journal: If the topic of your manuscript is not aligned with the Scope of the journal, your article risks being rejected irrespective of how good it is. This is because every journal today tries to have a differentiating factor in terms of its scope and coverage. If you do not cater to the journal’s target audience, you will not be published.

2) Readership (journal impact factor): A targeted audience by the journal is one thing, whether the journal is readily acknowledged by the targeted readers is a different parameter altogether. The best means of judging the readership spread of a journal the Journal Impact Factor (JIF). IF is the factor which is still considered in high esteem by authors, institutions, and employers around the world.  It is easier to get jobs, grants, and others when researchers have to their credit papers published in journals with high impact factors. Conversely, read the ‘letters to the editor’ section of the journal to gauge the readership of the journal.

3)  Check for Peer review process: You must do a background study on the peer-review process followed by the journal. Try to figure out the quality of reviewers, the usual timeline followed by the journal for peer-review process, the rates of rejection, etc. it is often helpful to refer to your peers for such details as they are not readily available. Engage a scientific research writing service who are better informed on these matters.

4) look at publication timelines: The wait following one’s submission of the manuscript is tedious. Look for the periodicity of the journal to understand the timelines. A monthly publication will process articles faster than a quarterly publication. The number of articles published in each edition is also an important metric. Often, authors prefer to wait or target special editions on their topics as it raises chances of publication within a definite timeframe.

5) check for redundancy: A major challenge for reputed journal publication is that others may have already reached them with similar content. Read recent issues of your target journal and other such publications to check if anything similar has been published. Professional scientific communication services can help you edit your content in such a manner that it fits well with the present discourse or is presented in a manner that will appeal to readers.

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