How can I find relevant journals to publish my research?
Answer
Finding Journals for Submission in Your Field
A good place to start is by looking for journals that have published research similar to your research topic.
One of the most reliable ways to find relevant journals for submission is to find similar research by colleagues in other peer-reviewed journals. For example: a quick search in Multi-Search for the keywords landscape architecture computer graphics, limited to peer-reviewed articles published within the past five years, brings up these search results.
Here are some other helpful resources to help you find journals:
- LibGuide: Search Strategies
- Guide: Finding Articles
- Academic Publishing: Journal Reputation.
- Assessing Journal Impact on your field
Lastly, you can use the databases listed in the LibGuide for Landscape Architecture to find research aligned with your subject area.
Putting It All Together
Let's use the example of a researcher who has written an article about finding perennial wildflower seed mixes that will thrive on inhospitable roadsides throughout Georgia.
A quick search in Google Scholar for perennial wildflower roadside seed mixes brings up about 12,000 results in peer-reviewed journals, and about 1,500 have been published since 2021.
A more targeted search pathway would be to visit the list of databases in my Landscape Architecture LibGuide. In the Garden, Landscape, and Horticulture database, for example, a search for the keyword "roadside" brings up about ~1,000 articles, including this article published in Natural Areas Journal.
You can use the UGA Libraries' Journal by Name search to access any journal that you find in a relevant citation.
This LibGuide on Journal Impact Factor provides several tools to help you evaluate the frequency with which a journal's published articles have been cited. You can try using these resources to identify the ranking of a journal you're interested in.
For example, one of the tools listed, Eigenfactor, shows that Natural Areas Journal has a fairly low impact rating.