Overview
The objective of this activity is to give you experience with finding a journal that aligns with an abstract.
There are many journals that accept, review, and publish work for publication. If you send your work to a journal that is not aligned with your work, you might receive a desk rejection, which is when the editor who receives your submission rejects your work outright without sending it for peer review. Oftentimes this is due to mismatched scope (i.e. the manuscript does not align with the journal topics or interest). Desk rejections are frustrating for authors, especially due to the time needed to prepare and submit an abstract according to journal standards.
One way to reduce the likelihood of a desk rejection is to use a journal finder or matchmaker. These take your abstract as an input on a web form and identify which journals might best align withing a publishing house's portfolio. Be careful when using these to check if they will store your abstract.
Instructions
The "Big Five" academic research publishers are typically considered to be Sage, Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis. Each one has a journal finder where you can search their portfolio for aligned journals to your work:
Pick one of the journals above. Then, upload keywords/an anstract of yours. Or, you could use the abstract of the sentinel bioinformatics paper Basic local alignment search tool published in 1990 by Altschul et al. to use as an example:
"A new approach to rapid sequence comparison, basic local alignment search tool (BLAST), directly approximates alignments that optimize a measure of local similarity, the maximal segment pair (MSP) score. Recent mathematical results on the stochastic properties of MSP scores allow an analysis of the performance of this method as well as the statistical significance of alignments it generates. The basic algorithm is simple and robust; it can be implemented in a number of ways and applied in a variety of contexts including straightforward DNA and protein sequence database searches, motif searches, gene identification searches, and in the analysis of multiple regions of similarity in long DNA sequences. In addition to its flexibility and tractability to mathematical analysis, BLAST is an order of magnitude faster than existing sequence comparison tools of comparable sensitivity."
- Did the journals make sense or match your expectations?
- Did the finder have a policy on storing the data you uploaded?
- Were you previously aware these tools existed?