Graduate Guide to Research

When deciding where to publish your work consider the following:

• What is your discipline? Who is your audience?
• What are some of the prominent publications in your field?
• What is the aim & scope of the journal that your are interested in?
• Has the journal published content similar to your work?
• What are the journal's restrictions?
• Is open access important to you?

These resource will help you learn more about publications in your discipline:

UlrichsWeb

• Contains bibliographic descriptions and ordering information for approximately 300,000 periodicals (also known as serials) including scholarly journals, popular magazines and newspapers. 

Journal Citation Reports

• Provides citation data that helps evaluate and compare more than 11,800 scholarly journals in the areas of business, science, technology, and social sciences.

JournalGuide

• A journal database across all academic fields including more than 46,000 titles.

Journal/Author Name Estimator

• Search PubMed documents by your abstract or title to find comparable authors, titles and journals.

CARL How to Assess a Journal

Journal Policies

Aim & Scope

• Is it appropriate to your research?

Publications

• Do the articles appear credible?

Editorial Board

• Does it include recognized experts from your field?

Peer Review

• Is the policy clearly stated & explained?

Copyright

• What are your rights?

Publication Fees

• Are they clearly explained?

Open Access Policy

• Is there an open access policy and does it meet your needs?

Indexing

Subject databases

• Is the journal indexed in databases relevant to your field?

Publisher Information

Location & Contact Information

• Is it provided?

Digital Preservation

• Are there guidelines for how the journal archive will be preserved?

Predatory Publishing 

For more information about predatory publishing, see the McMaster University How to Avoid Predatory Publishing and Conferences guide and checklist. 

 

Certain publishers make it difficult for authors to retain rights to their publications but there are ways to retain full or partial rights to your work.

SHERPA/RoMEO

• Allows individuals to search for journals or publishers by name and view their copyright and self-archiving policies in order to learn permissions connected to the publisher's copyright transfer agreement.

SPARC

• A global coalitions dedicated to making Open the default for research and education. SPARC has created a brochure that includes information about copyright and author's rights as well as an addendum that you can use to modify your copyright transfer agreement.

CAUT Intellectual Property Advisory

• Advises academic staff on how to retain copyright ownership of the articles that they publish in academic journals.