Some journals are very competitive and may have very high rejection rates. You can look at the acceptance rate to get an idea of the likelihood of your journal being accepted and if it might be worth looking at a more specialized journal with a higher acceptance rate.
Do you want to maintain copyright privileges of your work? Most journals require that you sign over the copyright, but many now have clauses that allow you to upload your work to an institutional repository. Some will charge you a lot of money to get a copy of your own article after publication. If this is important to you, look over the copyright guidelines before submitting to a journal.
If you were awarded a grant to conduct research, you will need to check to see if there are any publishing stipulations. For example, the NIH Public Access Policy requires that the final manuscript of all NIH-funded research must be submitted to PubMed Central upon acceptance of publication. If you have been awarded a grant and the awarding agency has publication policies, you will need to check with the journal you are submitting to in order to verify that they can comply with those policies.
If you are looking for a journal that is influential in the field, you may try looking at the level of influence and ranking. Here are some tools to help you note a journal’s impact and ranking:
If you want people to read your work, one of the best ways of getting your work out there and available to researchers is by publishing in a journal that is indexed in a major database. In order for people to read and reference your article, they need to be able to find it. Having an article indexed by PubMed or Alt HealthWatch means that there is a higher chance of people referencing your work.
You may want to select a journal that you actually like! Which journals keep popping up in your research? What do your colleagues read? Which journals does our library subscribe to?
If you are on a time constraint, you may want the length of the review process to weigh into your decision. Some journals are monthly, but others may only be published twice a year. Your chances of getting published by a journal with more frequent publications may be higher because they are publishing way more material than quarterly or bi-annual publications. By contacting the editor, you can also find out how long it takes the average submission to get to publication (or rejection).
Many journals now allow you the option of paying a fee to make your article “open access,” i.e., freely available to the public. Some journals are completely open access, so publishing with them at all will require that you pay a large open access fee (normally between $750 - $1500 for an institution of OCOM’s size).
Peer-review is a process in which your paper is evaluated by peers in your field, demonstrating the strength, quality, and credibility of your article. OCOM does not participate in the tenure process, so there is no requirement of being published in a peer-reviewed journal. However, OCOM’s faculty evaluation system does require faculty to create portfolios, which are reviewed by their faculty peers; publishing in peer-reviewed publications is a great addition to your professional portfolio.
Do you want to publish in a conventional or alternative medicine journal? If your paper is about teaching or educational policy, an education journal may be more appropriate than a medical journal.
Who do you want your article to reach? Acupuncture practitioner? International audiences? Or is your target audience conventional doctors and researchers? Reading the journals scope and mission statement
Is your paper an original study? Case study? Literature review? Be sure to check the journal requirements to verify that the journal you are submitting actually accepts the type of paper you are submitting.