Authors' Guide

Choosing Where to Submit Your Research

Of all the medical journals, how do you choose where to begin sending out your manuscript? Here are a few tools to help you consider:

1. Open Access Journals - increase your reach
2. PubMed Reminer - discover journals interested in your research 
3. Journal Impact Factors - get attention

Open access (OA) describes a model of scholarly publishing which reduces barriers for readers in accessing research.

For researchers, OA journals and publishers are a way to give your findings the broadest possible audience, however, publishing costs may be shifted to the author.

Mandated Open Access:

Now, many government-sponsored grants and other funding agencies are requiring open access publishing of papers, research results, and the data.

The open access terms are usually specified in the grant application, and may refer to publicly accessible repositories or open access databases. Many mainstream journals (traditional paid model) are finding ways to work with these requirements. They may publish articles with those requirements as "open access" (free) after the maximum paid access time frame, or in a separate supplement or title. Or, in some cases, they require the author to pay an additional fee in order to meet the grant mandate. Authors must carefully read the terms of their grant funding, and also of their publishing agreement with a journal. Obligation to publish your research as "open access" does not mean you can violate a copyright agreement with a journal publisher. It is up to the author to make sure both contracts are compatible.

Considerations for Open Access Publishing for Authors

Researchers required by grant funding, to publish their articles open access, may be surprised to see that many reputable open access journal options charge significant author fees. 

Pay-to-publish or author-pay models of open access have some problems:

• Not affordable.  New researchers often cannot afford to publish in the high impact open access journals. Good research may be discouraged and lost to the progress and translation of knowledge. 
• Bad journals.  Authors may be tempted by low fees of less-reputable journals Some of these journals have been described as "predatory", have little or no peer-review process, and are seen as illegitimate sources in the discipline. Worse, the article may be buried or never published, and never indexed or findable in the literature. Author beware!
• Uploading does not fulfill open access requirements, particularly if you are breaking contract terms. It is probably illegal for you to upload a copyright protected PDF to a "research sharing" website or platform. Once an author has a contract with a journal publisher, the author does not automatically have the right to distribute the work to large open groups via the internet. 

Discounts for Authors 

BC Cancer / BCCRC do not have any affiliations or memberships that offer authors a discount on their Open Access publishing fees at this time (2022).

Some journal publishers offer organizations a membership-subscription model that provided their affiliate authors a discount when submitting articles to those journals.  The BC Cancer Library is not aware of any such availability for BC Cancer researchers and authors. If you have other affiliations you could check with those institutions, e.g. the UBC Scholarly Communications Office.

If you have a UBC faculty appointment, check these resources:

• Open Publishing Program supporting the development of open access publications
• UBC Library List of Open Access Publisher Discounts - a variety of options plus other UBC funding for publications

Would you like to know which journals, indexed in Medline, publish the most articles on your topic?

PubReMiner is an analysis tool, generating dynamic descriptions of PubMed (Medline) search results. Quickly map the number of articles on a topic published over a series of years, or which authors are the most prolific in an area.

What You Get

If you search PubReMiner for a topic, for example the MeSH or title words or keywords from your research, the results will include a list of journals which have published articles matching those terms.  That list could be very useful in discovering journals likely to accept articles in your field, journals which publish articles with titles like yours.

Authors may also be curious to see how their own work has been indexed with subject headings, or view the ranking of journals results.

How To Search

Enter a search query or set of search terms in the main box, and a box displays with the number of results, counting down as PubReMiner analyzes them. The analysis appears as a simple table with columns showing the distribution of variables: publication years, authors, MeSH headings, keywords, and journal titles.

You can also search by human genes.

Clicking on an entry in the analysis table, adds it to the search set (with AND), and shows the analysis of only that group of articles.

Words in the search box are fed directly into PubMed, so be cautious with truncation, wild cards, or field searching.

The "JIF" impact factors for journals are compiled in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) database, which is part of the Web of Science database. BC Cancer does not have a subscription to this database, however UBC Faculty and students can obtain information about impact factors through UBC Library's access to JCR.

The impact factor scores reflect how often a particular article, or articles from a particular journal, has been cited since publication. In theory, journals with higher impact factors are being used or discussed more than others. There is debate as to whether this score is an accurate measure of value or impact on clinical practice.

How is the JIF used?

• As an indicator of journal prestige or significance. This is very much debated.
• Grant applications / CVs sometimes request the JIF for each article a person has published.  That means the JIF (impact factor) for that particular journal in the year when the article was published, because JIF scores change from year to year.
• Research reports or promotions might calculate total or average JIF scores for a set of work, e.g. annual publishing activity.  
• Choosing to which journal an author will submit an article, with the aim of publishing in a higher JIF publication.
• Journal Citation Reports database (JCR, Web of Science) can be used to locate the articles which have cited a specific item, in order to see what research has been done since that time, or based on that work.  It is a powerful search but not exhaustive.

Other Impact Measures

You may also notice that Google Scholar has a link telling you "this article has been cited in 79 other articles," but that is a highly unreliable indicator. Many of Google's resulting "citations" are to dead ends or irrelevant research.

An interesting "alternate" impact factor is SCImago Journal Ranking. Here is their 2018 ranking of oncology journals; they also have a subject category of 'cancer research.' Definitions of their scores are available on their Help page, with various cool analytic tools.

Academic and professional groups have also proposed measures of clinical value, use in the literature, or level of research value, discussion, or activity. Unfortunately, when a "Journal Impact Factor" is requested, usually only the JIF from SCR is accepted. Currently, none of the alternate systems produce an identical score to the JIF.

With more author-pay publishing models, there are also more "predatory" or "fake" journals, offering to publish for a price. How can an author know whether a journal is reputable, peer reviewed, and a valid place to publish? 

Website, such as Stop Predatory Journals provide a list of suspected predatory journals, but they are not comprehensive or 100% reliable. 

One place to start is to check whether the journal has made it through the National Library of Medicine review process. While not a guarantee, the NLM reviewers do check for signs of journal quality and validity.