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How to choose a journal
We can help you choose the most suitable journal for your article. You can find the journals we publish on Taylor & Francis Online. Visit the individual journal web pages and read the Aims & Scope to find out about the type of papers that the journal accepts.
Some questions you might wish to consider are:
- Does the journal have an international audience?
- Is the journal peer reviewed?
- Who is the editor?
- Who is on the editorial board?
- Which authors publish in the journal?
- Is the journal in the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI®) database?
- Is the journal available online?
- Is the journal published by an international association or learned society?
We publish over 1,750 quality journals in association with 500 learned societies and scholarly institutions. Our program spans subject areas including geography, education, sociology, planning, communication, area studies, history, economics, international relations, literature, sport, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, politics, physics, chemistry, mathematics, engineering, and earth science.
925 of our journals are now listed in or have been accepted for listing in the Thomson Scientific (ISI) Citation Indexes. Over 790 of these were ranked in the 2012 Science and Social Sciences Journal Citation Reports® (JCRs®). Top-ranked journals include The American Journal of Bioethics, Structural Equation Modelling, Political Communication, Enterprise Information Systems, Journal of Peasant Studies, Journal of the American Planning Association, and Eurasian Geography and Economics.
We've brought together tips from some of our journal editors on choosing a journal and learning from successful authors.
Advice from Professor Stephen Ball, Editor of Journal of Education Policy:
"Some people who send papers ... simply send it to the wrong journal and that's becoming increasingly the case ... And it's surprising how many people submit papers clearly never having read the journal, never opened a page of the journal or read on the website what it is the journal's interested in. And increasingly, as the Managing Editor, I'm fielding papers at the initial stage which we would never send out for review and I write back and I say sorry, this doesn't fit within the remit of our journal."
"Be ... tactical in terms of thinking about which journal you want to send your paper to so you don't end up wasting your time."
"That can be frustrating as an Editor. I feel I'm having my time wasted when people send papers to the journal which patently don't fit in the journal at all. And they're wasting their own time because then they have to wait for us to read the paper and look at it and send it back to them and then they have to go through it again. I imagine there are some people who spend their life sending their papers to journals that don't want to publish them, not because they're not good papers but because they're just in the wrong place."
Advice from Professor Elspeth Broady, an Editor of the Language Learning Journal:
"We are obviously looking for something that's relevant to our readership."
Advice from Professor John Evans, Editor of Sport, Education and Society:
"We're looking for something that's got something to say to the professions that are the readership of our journal."
"The most common mistake is not to have looked at the journal, not to have appreciated, I think, what it is about."
Advice from Professor Douglas Allford, an Editor of the Language Learning Journal:
"Also it's a good idea to read previous issues of the [journal] so as to get a feel of what it is we publish."
Advice from Professor Roger Slee, Editor of the International Journal of Inclusive Education:
"I guess the advice from where I sit would be that people writing for the journal ought to look back over the journal and think about what's been contributed and the way things have been framed for the journal."
Advice from Professor Michael Reiss, Editor of Sex Education:
"There's no doubt that as an Editor, when you first get a submission, what you're doing is two things: at one level you're simply filtering so, a fairly small proportion, we're probably only talking about twenty, twenty-five percent, do not get sent out by me for review, that's because they fall into one of a number of categories. Sometimes they simply fall outside the scope of the journal."
Advice from Professor Len Barton, Editor of Disability and Society:
"A most common problem of a submission is the lack of time and thought that authors have given to examining some of the back issues in the journal. Without this effort they are not able to connect to the history and ideas that have developed over the life of the journal. They are not sensitive to the history of those ideas, not that we are asking them to accept them but to be at least aware of them. We are still having articles today where there isn't a single reference to any published paper in twenty-odd years in this journal."
Advice from Professor David Gillborn, Editor of Race Ethnicity and Education:
"Look at past issues of the journal. See what kinds of things are published, I mean basically identify the papers that you think are the strongest papers. So everyone has certain papers that they think are amongst the key things in their field. Well what sets those papers apart? Look at how they've been constructed and then try and do the same."
Advice from Professor Sue Clegg, member of the Executive Editorial Board of Teaching in Higher Education :
"When I do the first read through of papers that come in, it's clear that I am sometimes getting things from people that haven't read the policy statement and actually haven't read papers, so one of the things that we added to the policy statement last time was to actually encourage people to situate themselves within the journal. So I'm afraid that the reason sometimes that papers get rejected before they go out to peer review is that they're simply not suitable for the journal; that they are very descriptive, small-scale descriptions of what went on in their classroom, and so that actually they're not suitable. One of the most important things that we say back to people at that stage, is 'please go away and read the policy statement, please go away and read the journal'."
Read more tips on how to get published from our Editors
Instructions for authors
When you have found the most suitable journal for your article, please read through the Instructions for Authors carefully. Each journal has its own, specific set of detailed instructions which can be found via a link on the journal's web page.
Our journals consider all manuscripts on the strict condition that they have been submitted only to that journal and that they have not been published already. They must not be under consideration for publication or in press elsewhere.
It is essential that you prepare your manuscript according to the journal's format and style specifications. Please read through the Instructions for Authors carefully before preparing your manuscript for submission.
Further information about the journal, including links to the online sample copy and online contents pages, can be found on the journal homepage.
If you need help to prepare your manuscript for submission, please see our Resources for authors.
For more information you can email our Author Services department at authorqueries@tandf.co.uk (please mention the journal title in your email).
We've brought together tips from some of our journal editors on the importance of following the journal guidelines.
Advice from Douglas Allford, an Editor of the Language Learning Journal:
"There are notes to contributors published in the journal; contributors are advised strongly to read these and to comply with them having read them."
Advice from Professor Michael Reiss, Editor of Sex Education:
"The most obvious advice, that journal editors are always absolutely amazed at the fact that only about half of all submissions manage to take account of it, is to follow precisely the journal guidelines."
Advice from Professor Len Barton, Editor of Disability and Society:
"Too many authors do not pay attention to the guidance for submission, believe it or believe it not, including in this journal, the policy statement on language and referencing, and do not keep to the specified wordage required. It is not a way of encouraging endearment of the editor of this journal to find a person who is presenting a paper that is one and a half thousand words longer than the recommended word length. It's a basic factor but it's still constantly one that we are having to face."
Advice from Professor Elspeth Broady, an Editor of the Language Learning Journal:
"We are also very, very sensitive to people checking their papers before they hand them in. ... Please do check ... the bibliographical guidelines."
Read more tips on how to get published from our Editors
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