How to Choose a Target Journal — A Practical Workflow for Clinicians
If you only start looking for a journal after the manuscript is finished, you will almost always wish you had decided earlier. Ideally you should have about three candidate journals in mind while you are still finalising the study design. This article sets out how to make that decision in five steps.
Step 1: Draw up a list of journals whose scope fits
The single most common reason for rejection is that the manuscript does not fit the journal's scope. Before you look at Impact Factors, assemble the journals that actually fit your content. The three quickest ways to do this are:
- Go through your own reference list and count which journals appear most often
- Search PubMed for papers on the same topic from the past three years and tally where they were published
- Scan this site's journal list from the top of the relevant category
Once you have candidates, read each journal's "Aims & Scope" page and check whether it accepts case reports, whether it welcomes retrospective studies, and whether it will publish material limited to one region. Even among the major emergency medicine journals, for example, it is not unusual to find journals that do not accept case reports at all.
Step 2: Use the Impact Factor and quartile to decide which tier to aim for
Rank your candidates by Impact Factor and sort them into three tiers according to how strong your study is.
| Tier | Rough guide | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Stretch | Upper Q1 within the field | A big win if it lands, but assume rejection and budget the time |
| Primary | Lower Q1 to Q2 | Journals that genuinely publish studies like yours |
| Fallback | Q2 to Q3, or a dedicated open access journal | A reliable home to make sure the work gets out |
What matters is whether studies with the same design actually appear in that journal. If yours is a single-centre retrospective study of 100 patients, a journal that publishes only multicentre RCTs does not even qualify as a stretch option. Judge by the papers the journal publishes, not by the Impact Factor.
Step 3: Check review time and acceptance rate
If you are working to a deadline for a degree or a promotion, review time matters more than the Impact Factor. Most publishers post the average time to first decision and the acceptance rate on the journal's home page (Elsevier under Journal Insights, Springer under Journal metrics, Wiley under Journal Metrics). Rough benchmarks are as follows.
- Time to first editorial decision: a few days to two weeks for a desk rejection; four to ten weeks if it goes out to peer review
- Acceptance rate: 5% or less at the top general journals, 15–30% at the leading specialty journals, 40–60% at dedicated open access journals
For details, see "Review Time and Acceptance Rate: Benchmarks and How to Look Them Up".
Step 4: Check the cost
Open access journals charge an article processing charge (APC). As of 2026, the main BMC, Frontiers and MDPI journals charge somewhere around 300,000–500,000 yen, while the open access journals in the Nature and Lancet families exceed 800,000 yen. Before you submit, check whether your research funding can cover this and whether your institution has a transformative (Read & Publish) agreement that provides a discount or a waiver. With subscription (hybrid) journals, publication is usually free as long as you do not choose the open access option.
Step 5: Decide in advance what happens after a rejection
If you wait until the rejection arrives to start looking for the next journal, you lose one to two weeks. Decide before you submit where you will go if your first choice says no, so that when the rejection notice comes you can reformat the manuscript and resubmit the same day.
Some publishers will offer to transfer your manuscript to another journal within the same publishing group (Elsevier, Springer Nature and Wiley among them). The reviewer comments are carried over, which saves time, but the journals offered are often open access titles with lower Impact Factors, so weigh the offer against the cost.
How to spot journals to avoid
So-called predatory journals send out emails soliciting submissions, publish without peer review, and charge a hefty APC. Check the following points.
- Whether the journal is indexed in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) (this site's list) or in PubMed (MEDLINE)
- Whether it is registered in DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals)
- Whether the editorial board members' names and affiliations correspond to real people who really do sit on the board
- Whether it makes unrealistic promises such as "peer review completed within days"
Summary
Choosing a target journal is straightforward if you work through it in this order: scope, then relative standing, then time, then cost, then the next candidate. The Impact Factor is only the second of these considerations, but it remains the most convenient single measure of where a journal stands within its field. Use this site's list as your first step.