---
name: journal-and-venue-selection
description: >
  Matches a finished paper to the right publication venue by reading what the
  venue actually publishes, and screens candidates for predatory practice. Use for
  "where should I submit this paper", "which journal", "is this journal
  legitimate", "predatory publisher check", "I got desk rejected", "should I
  preprint this", "conference or journal", "what does open access cost me",
  "am I aiming too high", "can I submit to two journals at once".
category: 15 Academic University Research
ref: "15.25"
tier: 3
inherits: [K2, K3, K4, K5]
---

# Journal and Venue Selection

## 1. One-line description

A method for choosing where to submit a finished piece of research, based on what a venue actually publishes and who it reaches rather than on its reputation, with a practical screening procedure for predatory and low-quality outlets and an honest treatment of the costs of aiming too high or too low.

## 2. What this skill is used for

**The research problem it solves.** Venue selection is usually done badly and quickly, at the end of a long project, by an author who is tired of the paper. Two failure patterns dominate. The first is prestige-led selection: choosing by standing in the field, submitting, and being desk rejected in a fortnight for scope, which is by a wide margin the most common reason a paper never reaches review. The second is convenience-led selection: submitting to whatever solicited the paper by email, which is how researchers end up in outlets that do no real review, are not indexed where their field looks, charge fees that were not disclosed, and permanently attach the work to a venue colleagues do not recognise. Both are avoidable with an hour of reading. This skill supplies the reading: how to establish what a venue actually publishes, how to assess fit against the paper's contribution and audience, how to screen for predatory practice on checkable signals, and how to build a submission ladder that neither wastes months at the top nor undersells the work at the bottom.

**Where it sits in the research lifecycle.** After the paper's contribution is fixed and the manuscript is substantially complete, and before submission. Some of it belongs earlier: in fields where conferences are the primary venue, or where a funder mandates an access route, the venue decision constrains the project timetable and should be made during the work rather than after it.

**Typical use cases.**
- Choosing a target venue and two or three fallbacks for a finished manuscript.
- Diagnosing a desk rejection and deciding where to go next.
- Checking whether an unfamiliar journal, particularly one that made contact first, is legitimate.
- Deciding between a conference and a journal in a field where both are real options.
- Working out what an open access route will cost and who pays it.
- Deciding whether to post a preprint, and when.
- Advising a student or junior colleague on their first submission.

**Who uses it.** Doctoral researchers submitting for the first time; early-career academics building a publication record; established researchers publishing outside their usual subfield; research managers in applied and policy settings deciding whether to publish at all; supervisors advising on where a student's work belongs.

## 3. When to use it

- A manuscript is finished, or close enough that its contribution and length are fixed.
- A paper has been desk rejected and you need to understand why before resubmitting.
- An unfamiliar journal has invited a submission and you cannot tell whether it is real.
- Your field uses conferences as a primary venue and you need to decide between routes.
- A funder or institution mandates an access route and you need to know what that permits.
- You are deciding whether and when to post a preprint.
- Co-authors disagree about how ambitious to be, and the disagreement needs a basis other than instinct.
- You are advising someone else on where to submit and want a defensible procedure rather than a personal habit.

## 4. When NOT to use it

- **The paper is not finished, or its contribution is not fixed.** Venue selection depends on knowing what the paper claims, who needs to read it, and roughly how long it is. Choosing a venue first and then writing to fit it produces papers shaped by a word limit rather than by an argument. Finish first with **15.24 Journal Article Development**. The exception is a field where conferences dominate and submission deadlines drive the schedule, where the venue is chosen early by necessity and the paper is written to its deadline.
- **The real problem is that the paper has no contribution.** No venue fixes this. A paper repeatedly rejected on substance is not a venue-selection problem, and moving down the ladder until something accepts it is the mechanism by which weak work ends up in weak outlets. Go back to **15.24**, and to **15.13 Doctoral Research Positioning and Originality** where the originality claim is what is contested.
- **The paper is currently under review somewhere.** Simultaneous submission is prohibited across essentially all reputable venues (Step 9). Selection for the next venue can be prepared, but no second submission is made until the first is formally withdrawn or decided. Where the current review is going badly, **15.26 Peer Review Response** covers the revise, appeal or withdraw decision.
- **The decision is really about whether to publish at all.** Commercial confidentiality, participant risk, an unresolved consent basis, a finding that could harm the group it came from, or a collaboration agreement restricting disclosure are prior questions, and they are ethical rather than strategic. See **13.05 Research Ethics and Consent Design**. `RESEARCHER DECISION REQUIRED` (K5 §2.4).
- **The venue is already fixed by a binding obligation.** A funder condition, a special issue commitment, a collaboration agreement, or an institutional requirement. In that case the useful work is checking that the obligation permits what the author intends (access route, embargo, data availability), not comparing candidates.
- **Someone wants a ranking of journals in a field, or a verdict on a named journal from model knowledge alone.** This skill does not produce or reproduce league tables, and will not compare venues on prestige metrics as though those measured fit. Nor will it declare a named journal reputable or predatory on recall: screening requires checking the venue's own site, the indexing services' own records, and board members' own institutional pages, and assertions made without those checks are unreliable in exactly the cases that matter. See §12.2 and §12.4.
- **The question is how to respond to reviewers.** That is **15.26 Peer Review Response**, which also carries the confidentiality rules for manuscripts in review.
- **What is wanted is a cover letter or a fit claim to be sent unedited under the author's name.** A cover letter is a representation to an editor that the author signs. This skill structures the assessment, interrogates the fit judgement and critiques the author's draft; it does not write the submission. The academic integrity constraint in §12.1 governs everything here, including any AI use declaration the venue requires at submission.

## 5. Required inputs

**Required.**
- **The finished or near-finished manuscript**, or at minimum its contribution claim, abstract, length and study design. Without these, fit cannot be assessed.
- **The field or subfield, and the audience the work needs to reach.** Venue norms differ so completely between disciplines that generic advice is close to useless. If not supplied, ask.
- **Access to the candidate venues' own published material.** Their recent issues or proceedings, their stated scope, and their author guidelines. Screening and fit assessment are both reading exercises. If nothing can be opened, the assessment cannot be made, and saying so is the correct output (K4 §6.4).

**Optional, and what each one adds.**
- **Constraints on time.** A deadline (a probation review, a grant report, a thesis submission, a competitor working on the same question) changes the ladder: it makes turnaround a first-order criterion rather than a tiebreaker.
- **Funder and institutional mandates.** Access requirements, embargo limits, licensing conditions and any repository deposit obligation. These rule out venues outright and are cheaper to check first than to discover at acceptance.
- **Who will pay any publication charge, and up to what limit.** Turns the access-model discussion from abstract into decidable, and prevents an acceptance the author cannot afford to take up.
- **The author's own reading list.** The venues where the author found the work they cite are, in most fields, the best first candidate list available, and it costs nothing to assemble.
- **Prior submission history for this paper.** Where it has been rejected and on what grounds. A scope rejection and a substance rejection point to completely different next moves.
- **Career stage and what the record needs to show.** Determines how much risk in the ladder is affordable. A researcher with a review deadline in eight months and a researcher with three years cannot use the same strategy, and pretending otherwise is unhelpful.
- **Co-author preferences and constraints.** Including any co-author whose institution or funder imposes conditions the lead author does not share.

## 6. Questions to ask before starting

1. **Who needs to read this for it to do its work?** The single most useful question, and the one most often skipped in favour of "where will it count". Determines the field, the subfield and often the venue directly. Default if unanswered: assume the audience is the community whose work the paper cites most.
2. **What does this field actually reward, and what does the author's institution count?** These are not the same, and where they conflict the author has to choose knowingly. Default: surface the conflict rather than resolving it; this is a career judgement, not an analytical one (K5 §2.3).
3. **Is a conference a primary venue in this field, or a secondary one?** In some fields the archival conference is where the field's central work appears; in others a conference paper is a work-in-progress step toward a journal. Getting this wrong misallocates the whole publication effort. Default: ask, do not assume.
4. **What access model is required or affordable, and who pays?** Default: assume nothing is funded, and identify routes that do not require a payment the author cannot make.
5. **Is there a deadline, and what happens if the paper is not published by it?** Default: assume no hard deadline, and flag the ladder's expected total elapsed time so the author can correct that assumption.
6. **Has any version of this been posted, presented or published anywhere?** Preprints, conference versions, thesis deposit and working papers all interact with venue policies, and the policies differ by field. Default: ask explicitly, because authors routinely do not count these as prior publication.
7. **What did the last rejection say?** If there is one. A scope rejection, a substance rejection and a rejection with encouraging comments lead to three different next venues. Default: treat an unexplained rejection as a scope rejection until evidence says otherwise, because that is the base rate.

## 7. Step-by-step methodology

**Step 1. Define the paper's venue profile before looking at any venue.**
Write down six things about the paper: its contribution claim in one sentence, the audience that needs it, its length, its study design and evidence type, its subfield, and any constraints (funder mandate, deadline, budget for charges, co-author conditions). This is the specification the venue must match. Doing it first matters because a specification written after looking at venues is contaminated by them: authors reliably rewrite what their paper is about to fit a journal they want to be in, and reviewers for that journal notice. *Correct result: a six-line profile, written before any candidate is considered.*

**Step 2. Build the candidate list from the paper's own reference list and from the field's actual publishing behaviour.**
The strongest first source is the paper's bibliography: the venues that published the work this paper is in conversation with are the venues whose readers need it. Count them. A venue appearing four times in the references is a stronger candidate than one the author has heard of. Extend from three other sources: where recent work on this exact question appeared, whatever the venue's standing; where the authors this paper contests publish; and, in fields with archival conferences, the series carrying this line of work. Aim for eight to twelve candidates spanning a range of selectivity, and do not filter yet. *Correct result: a candidate list with, for each, the reason it is on the list and where that reason came from.*

**Step 3. Read the last year of every serious candidate. This is the step that does the work.**
Scope statements are marketing: written broadly, rarely updated, and a journal that says it covers a topic may not have published on it in five years. What a venue publishes is a matter of record, and reading twelve months of titles and abstracts (an hour per venue, at most) tells you what the scope statement will not: the questions it is currently interested in, the methods it accepts, the typical length and structure, the evidence standard, how theoretical or applied it is, and whether the conversation your paper joins is happening there. For each candidate record how many papers in the last year are close to yours in topic, how many in method, the modal length, and whether you can name a specific recent paper your work speaks to. A candidate where you cannot name that paper is weak whatever its reputation. *Correct result: a fit note per candidate, evidencing the judgement from actual published content rather than from the scope page.*

**Step 4. Assess scope fit explicitly, because it is the commonest reason for desk rejection.**
A desk rejection is an editor's decision, usually within days, that the paper will not be sent for review. Scope is the dominant cause: not that the paper is bad, but that it is not for this venue's readers. Grade each candidate **central** (papers like this appear regularly and its readers are your audience), **plausible** (it publishes in this area occasionally and the paper would need framing to land), or **stretch** (topic, method or evidence type outside what it has recently published). The temptation to grade upward is strong and costs months. Where a candidate is plausible, note what framing would make it land and whether that framing is compatible with the contribution claim; if it is not, the candidate is a stretch. *Correct result: a scope grade per candidate with the evidence for it, and a note of the framing cost where any is required.*

**Step 5. Assess the operational characteristics that affect the author's actual life.**
Four things matter and are, to varying degrees, checkable. **Turnaround**: some venues publish median times to first decision and to publication; where they do not, the dates printed on recent articles give a usable estimate, and colleagues' experience is real evidence even though it is anecdotal. **Selectivity**: record a published acceptance rate; where none is published, do not estimate one, and note that unpublished selectivity is itself information. **Review model**: single-anonymised, double-anonymised, open, post-publication, or transfer arrangements between venues. This affects preparation (a double-anonymised venue needs the manuscript anonymised, including self-citations and data availability statements) and how the review is likely to go. **Editorial responsiveness**: whether editor names and contact routes are published, and whether presubmission enquiries are invited, which is often the cheapest way to settle a scope question in a week rather than three months. *Correct result: a comparison table with these four fields populated from evidence, and unknowns marked as unknown rather than filled with plausible values (K4 §2.1).*

**Step 6. Work out the access model and who pays, in the specific case.**
Access models vary and the terminology is inconsistent between fields and publishers, so establish what applies to this venue rather than assuming a general pattern. The structural questions: is there a charge to publish, and how much; is there a charge to read, and does that matter for the audience the paper needs; what licence applies to the published version, and does it satisfy any mandate the author is under; what version may be deposited in a repository, after what embargo; and whether waivers, discounts, institutional agreements or funder arrangements apply here. Two errors are common: discovering a charge at acceptance, when the paper is committed and the negotiating position is gone; and assuming a mandate is satisfied when the licence or embargo does not in fact comply, which surfaces at reporting time. A charge that cannot be paid is a hard filter and belongs at this step. Note that a publication charge is not by itself a sign of a predatory venue, and its absence is not a sign of a legitimate one; Step 7 does that work. *Correct result: for each remaining candidate, the charge if any, who would pay it, the licence, the deposit terms, and a yes or no against any mandate.*

**Step 7. Screen for predatory and low-quality practice on checkable signals.**
Run this on every candidate the author has not published in or reviewed for, and always on any venue that made contact first. The signals below are checkable, which is what makes them usable; each is verified at its own source, never at the venue's description of itself.

| Signal | How to check it | What a bad result looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Indexing claims | Search for the journal at the indexing service's own site, not the journal's | The journal claims indexing that the index does not show |
| Editorial board | Pick three or four named board members and look for the journal on their own institutional pages or profiles | People cannot be found, are not in the field, or do not list the role; some have been listed without consent |
| Fees | Find the charge on the venue's own site before submission | Fees are absent, buried, or first mentioned after acceptance |
| Contact and location | Look for a verifiable editorial address and a working route to a named editor | Only a web form; a stated location that does not match anything else about the operation |
| Solicitation | Read the invitation you received | Flattering, generic, misspells your name or field, promises rapid publication, arrives days after an unrelated paper appeared |
| Turnaround promises | Compare the promised time to what real review takes in your field | Peer review promised in days; a full cycle promised in under a month |
| Published content | Read three recent articles end to end | Poor language and formatting, no visible copy-editing, papers wildly outside the stated scope, evident absence of review |
| Metrics | Trace any impact-style metric to the organisation that issues it | Unfamiliar metric names, metrics that cannot be traced to an issuing body, numbers on the site that appear nowhere else |
| Scope breadth | Read the scope statement against the published content | A single journal claiming to cover most of science, or a title much narrower than its actual contents |
| Editorial process | Read the stated process and check it against the promised timeline | A described process that could not be executed in the time promised |

**The honest caveat: the boundary is not clean.** There is a genuine spectrum from outright fraudulent operations through low-quality but sincere venues, new journals that have not yet been indexed, small society and regional journals with limited infrastructure, and legitimate publishers with weak titles in their portfolio. A new journal in a specialist area may fail the indexing check for entirely innocent reasons. A regional journal publishing in a language other than the dominant one may look unfamiliar and be exactly the right venue for the work. Treat the signals as cumulative rather than individually decisive: one weak signal is a question, three or more together is a conclusion. Where the picture is genuinely mixed, the practical test is whether researchers the author respects in that specific subfield publish there and cite from it. `RESEARCHER DECISION REQUIRED` on any candidate that fails two or more signals but is still under consideration (K5 §2.8); publishing in a discredited venue attaches to the author's name permanently and is not a decision to make on an automated read.

**Step 8. Build a submission ladder, and price the cost of each rung.**
Order the survivors into a ladder of three or four, ranked by ambition, with every rung a venue the author would genuinely be content to publish in. Two errors have real costs and they are not symmetrical. **Aiming too high** costs elapsed time: at a highly selective venue the expected outcome for most papers is rejection, costing two weeks if it comes at desk stage and three to six months if it comes after review, though then the reviews may be useful. **Aiming too low** costs reach: the paper appears where the people who needed it do not look, which is the failure that is invisible because nothing bad appears to happen. Set the top rung by asking whether the paper's contribution is of the kind that venue publishes, not whether the author would like it to be. Then set a stopping rule in advance: how many rungs, and what would make you stop (two rejections citing the same substantive weakness are evidence about the paper, not the venues, and send it back to revision rather than down the ladder). Record expected elapsed time for the whole ladder, because that number is usually larger than authors assume and it changes the decision. *Correct result: an ordered ladder with, for each rung, the fit grade, the expected decision time, the charge and payer, and the reason it sits at that position. Plus a stopping rule.*

**Step 9. Settle the preprint and prior-dissemination questions, and confirm you are submitting to one venue only.**
Preprint norms are strongly field-dependent. In some fields posting before submission is standard, establishes precedence and attracts comment that improves the paper. In others it is unusual and may be treated by a venue as prior publication. Establish the field norm and the target venue's policy rather than generalising from either. Where a preprint is posted, decide the version and licence deliberately and plan to link the published version. The same check applies to a thesis deposited in a repository, a conference version and a working paper: none is automatically a problem, and all are automatically a disclosure obligation at submission. Then confirm the rule that admits no exceptions at reputable venues: **a manuscript is submitted to one venue at a time.** Simultaneous submission wastes the unpaid labour of reviewers at every venue but one, may commit the author to two conflicting publication agreements, and is treated as misconduct. Submit, wait for the decision, and if withdrawing, withdraw formally and in writing before submitting elsewhere. An intolerable wait is a reason to weight turnaround more heavily in Step 5, not a reason to break the rule. *Correct result: an explicit decision on preprinting with the field norm and venue policy recorded, a disclosure list of every prior version, and a confirmation that only one submission is live.*

**Step 10. Prepare the submission to the chosen venue's actual requirements, and write the cover letter.**
Read the author guidelines properly, once, and comply. Non-compliance is a cheap reason for an editorial office to return a manuscript before it reaches an editor, and it costs weeks for nothing. Check length limits and what counts toward them, reference style, required section headings, figure and table requirements, anonymisation where the review model requires it (including self-citations, acknowledgements, data and code links and file metadata), declarations of funding, conflicts of interest, data availability, ethics approval and AI use, and any required reporting checklist. Then write a short cover letter doing three things: state the contribution in one or two sentences, say specifically why this venue by naming the recent work the paper speaks to (the Step 3 evidence that scope fit was actually assessed), and make the required declarations including any prior dissemination. A cover letter that summarises the abstract adds nothing; one that shows the author read the journal is read with attention. *Correct result: a submission that complies with every stated requirement, and a cover letter naming the specific conversation the paper joins.* `RESEARCHER SIGN-OFF REQUIRED` before submission (K5 §2.8).

## 8. Analytical framework

Venue selection is a match on four dimensions, assessed independently and then traded off explicitly:

    Fit (does this venue publish this kind of work?)
      × Reach (do the people who need it read this venue?)
        × Feasibility (turnaround, charges, mandates, review model)
          × Integrity (is this a venue whose review means something?)

The multiplication is literal: a zero on any dimension makes the candidate unusable regardless of the others. A perfectly reputable venue with the wrong readers fails on reach. A venue with the right readers and an unaffordable charge fails on feasibility. A well-matched venue that fails the integrity screen fails absolutely, because publication there can damage the work's standing rather than establish it.

Applying it: score each surviving candidate on the four dimensions from the evidence gathered in Steps 3 to 7, then rank. The ranking is not the decision, because ambition and time enter at Step 8, but it makes the trade visible. The frequent error is to collapse all four dimensions into a single sense of a venue's standing, which is exactly the prestige-led selection that produces scope rejections. Standing is a partial proxy for integrity and a poor one for the other three.

## 9. Output format

**1. Paper profile.** The six lines from Step 1.

**2. Candidate table.**

| Venue | Why on the list | Papers like this in last 12 months | Scope grade | Review model | Typical time to first decision | Charge and payer | Mandate compliant | Screening result |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|

Unknowns are marked unknown. No field is populated with an estimate presented as a fact.

**3. Fit notes.** For each serious candidate, two or three sentences of evidence from actually reading recent issues, including the specific recent paper this work speaks to, or a note that none was found.

**4. Screening record.** For any venue screened, each signal from Step 7 with the result and where it was checked. Present the mixed cases as mixed.

**5. Submission ladder.** Three or four rungs in order, each with its reason, its expected elapsed time, and its cost. Total expected elapsed time for the ladder stated.

**6. Stopping rule.** What evidence would send the paper back to revision rather than down to the next rung.

**7. Preprint and prior dissemination decision.** The field norm, the venue policy, the decision, and the full disclosure list.

**8. Submission checklist for the chosen venue**, drawn from its own guidelines, plus the cover letter.

**When the assessment cannot be made, say so rather than filling the table (K4 §1, §6.4).** If candidate venues' content could not be accessed, the fit column is empty and the output says the fit assessment was not performed and why. If a venue's indexing or board could not be verified, the screening record says "could not verify", which is not the same as "failed" and not the same as "passed". If no candidate is both a good fit and reachable, the correct output says so and describes what would change it: a different framing, a different subfield, a shorter format, or the honest conclusion that the work belongs somewhere other than a journal.

## 10. Quality checks

Run before submission. These sit on top of K4 §8.

1. Was the paper profile written before any venue was considered?
2. Did the candidate list come from the paper's own references and the field's recent publishing, rather than from reputation?
3. Has an actual year of content been read for every candidate that reached the ladder?
4. For the chosen venue, can you name a specific recent paper the work speaks to?
5. Is any candidate graded "plausible" when the evidence says "stretch"?
6. Are turnaround, selectivity and review model recorded from evidence, with unknowns marked as unknown?
7. Has every venue not previously known to the author been screened on all ten signals?
8. Was any signal verified only at the venue's own description of itself?
9. Have the mixed cases been reported as mixed rather than forced to a verdict?
10. Is the publication charge known, and is the payer identified, before submission rather than after acceptance?
11. Does the chosen route satisfy every funder and institutional mandate, on licence and embargo as well as on access?
12. Is the preprint decision made against the field norm and the venue's stated policy, not by analogy with another field?
13. Is every prior version (preprint, thesis deposit, conference paper, working paper) disclosed in the submission?
14. Is exactly one submission live, and is any previous submission formally withdrawn in writing?
15. Does the submission comply with the venue's own guidelines on length, style, structure, anonymisation and declarations?

## 11. Common failure modes

| Failure | How to recognise it | How to prevent it |
|---|---|---|
| **Prestige-led selection** | The candidate list is a list of famous journals, none read recently | Build the list from the paper's references (Step 2) |
| **Scope rejection** | Desk rejected in under two weeks with a scope reason | Read a year of content and grade fit honestly (Steps 3 and 4) |
| **Reading the scope statement instead of the journal** | Fit justified by the "aims and scope" page | Scope pages are marketing; content is evidence (Step 3) |
| **Grade inflation on fit** | Everything is "plausible", nothing is "stretch" | Require a named recent paper the work speaks to |
| **The unsolicited invitation** | A flattering email offering fast publication | Screen every venue that made contact first (Step 7) |
| **Fee discovered at acceptance** | No one asked what publication costs | Establish charge and payer before submitting (Step 6) |
| **Mandate breached on licence, not access** | The paper is open but the licence or embargo does not comply | Check licence and deposit terms, not just openness (Step 6) |
| **Sliding down the ladder after substantive rejections** | Three rejections, same criticism, next venue is weaker | Two rejections on the same substantive point send the paper to revision (Step 8) |
| **Undisclosed prior version** | A preprint or conference paper not mentioned at submission | Disclose everything; it is almost never a problem, concealing it always is (Step 9) |
| **Simultaneous submission** | Two live submissions, justified by impatience | One at a time; weight turnaround instead (Step 9) |
| **Assuming one field's norms** | Preprint or conference advice imported from another discipline | Establish the field's norm explicitly (Steps 3 and 9) |
| **AI-asserted journal facts** | Confident claims about a specific journal's indexing, acceptance rate or standing, unchecked | Verify at the source or mark unknown (§12.2) |
| **AI-invented metrics** | A plausible-looking number for acceptance rate or turnaround | Never estimate these; unknown is a valid entry (§12.3) |
| **Guidelines skimmed** | Manuscript returned by the editorial office before review | Read the guidelines once, properly (Step 10) |

## 12. AI guardrails

Skill-specific. The universal prohibitions in K4 apply in full and are not repeated.

1. **Academic integrity is the binding constraint on everything in this skill.** These skills assist a researcher's thinking, structure and rigour. They do not produce work to be submitted as the researcher's own unaided output. The user must comply with the policies of their institution and of the venue they are submitting to, including any requirement to declare AI assistance. Many publishers now require disclosure of AI use in manuscript preparation and prohibit it entirely in peer review. The skill never writes a passage for submission as though the author wrote it; it interrogates, structures, critiques and teaches. In practice here: build the assessment procedure, structure the comparison, interrogate the fit judgement, and explain the screening signals. Do not draft a cover letter to be sent unedited under the author's name.

2. **Never state a fact about a specific named venue from model knowledge.** Scope, indexing, acceptance rate, turnaround, review model, charges, editorial board and standing all change, and model knowledge of them is dated and unreliable at exactly the granularity that matters. Every such statement is either verified at the source in this project and cited to it, or it is marked as unverified and the author is told where to check. This applies with particular force to legitimacy: never declare a named journal predatory or reputable on recall.

3. **Never estimate an acceptance rate, a turnaround time, an impact metric or a charge.** These look like the kind of thing that can be approximated. They cannot, and an approximated figure will be relied on. Where the value is not published, record "not published", which is itself useful information about the venue.

4. **Never produce a ranked list of journals in a field.** This skill assesses fit for one paper against evidence. A general ranking is a different claim, is contested in every field that has one, and cannot be produced without either a data source or fabrication.

5. **Do not assume a discipline, country or publication culture.** Conference status, preprint norms, monograph traditions, regional and non-dominant-language venues, single-author versus large-collaboration authorship, and what an institution counts all vary enormously. Where a norm matters and is unknown, ask. Do not treat the conventions of the most-discussed fields as the default.

6. **Report the predatory screening as a set of signals with sources, never as a verdict from pattern-matching on a name.** A journal name that resembles a well-known title, a publisher based in a particular country, or an unfamiliar title are not evidence. The signals in Step 7 are evidence because each is checkable. Where signals are mixed, report them as mixed and hand the judgement to the researcher.

7. **Never advise or facilitate simultaneous submission, and never present it as a grey area.** Where an author asks how to run two submissions in parallel, explain why it is prohibited and offer the legitimate alternatives: weight turnaround more heavily, use a presubmission enquiry, or withdraw formally before resubmitting.

8. **Never write a cover letter that claims something about the paper that the paper does not support**, including a fit claim that Step 3 did not establish. A cover letter is a representation to an editor and the author signs it.

## 13. Best-practice principles

- **Read the journal before you write for it, and read it again before you submit to it.** An hour with twelve months of content answers more questions than any amount of reasoning about reputation.
- **Your reference list is the best venue-finder you have.** It is empirical evidence about where this conversation is happening, assembled by you, for free.
- **Scope is the gate. Everything else is behind it.** A paper that does not fit is not read, however good it is.
- **A presubmission enquiry costs an email and saves a season.** Where a venue invites them, a short note with the abstract and the fit argument gets a scope answer in days rather than months.
- **Aiming high is a time bet, not a free option.** Make it deliberately, with the elapsed cost written down, and prefer the version of the bet where a rejection comes at desk stage rather than after six months.
- **Aiming low has a cost too, and it is invisible.** Nothing bad happens; the paper simply is not read by the people it was written for.
- **Two rejections making the same substantive criticism are data about the paper.** The correct response is revision, not a weaker venue.
- **Verify indexing at the index, board members at their institutions, and fees on the site before submission.** Every one of these takes minutes and every one has caught a bad venue for somebody.
- **Publication charges are not a signal of quality in either direction.** Both reputable and predatory venues charge; both reputable and predatory venues sometimes do not.
- **A small, specialist, unfashionable venue that your subfield reads is a better home than a broad, famous one that does not want your paper.** Reach is about the right readers, not the most readers.
- **Disclose every prior version, always.** Preprints, theses and conference papers are almost never a problem when declared and frequently a serious one when discovered.
- **Decide the ladder before the first submission, not after the first rejection.** Decisions made in the hour after a rejection are the worst decisions in the process.

## 14. Worked example

Generic fictional scenario, academic (public health and policy).

**INPUT**

A postdoctoral researcher has a finished manuscript reporting a mixed-methods evaluation of a municipal programme intended to improve access to primary care in a low-income urban district. The work has a policy audience and a methodological audience. The researcher's institution has a funder mandate requiring the accepted version to be openly available within a fixed period, no budget for publication charges, and a probation review in fourteen months. The researcher's instinct is to submit to the most prominent general journal in the field.

**PROCESS**

*Step 1.* Profile: contribution is that the programme's uptake gap is produced by referral practice rather than by patient awareness; audience is health policy researchers and the practitioner community that designs such programmes; 6,500 words; mixed-methods evaluation, non-randomised; subfield is health services research; constraints are the open access mandate, zero budget, and fourteen months.

*Step 2.* The candidate list is built from the reference list. Fifty-one references sit across nine venues. Three venues account for nineteen of them, and two of the three were not on the researcher's mental list. Two archival conference series in the field are added, plus one policy-facing outlet that publishes the practitioner-side literature the paper cites.

*Step 3.* Reading twelve months of content changes the picture substantially. The prominent general journal the researcher favoured has published nothing on service access in that period and its recent evaluation papers are all randomised; the paper's design is outside what it currently publishes. One of the two unfamiliar venues has published four papers on referral behaviour in the last year, including one the manuscript directly contests. The policy outlet publishes shorter pieces with a different evidence standard and would require the methodological contribution to be dropped.

*Step 4.* Scope grades: the general journal is a **stretch** (the researcher's first instinct was wrong, and the desk rejection was very likely). The unfamiliar venue with four related papers is **central**. A second society journal is **plausible** with reframing toward the policy implication, at the cost of compressing the methods section. The policy outlet is **central** for a different, shorter paper, and is recorded as a separate option rather than a rung.

*Steps 5 and 6.* The central venue is double-anonymised, so the manuscript must be anonymised including three self-citations and the data availability statement. Its published median time to first decision is acceptable against the deadline. Its immediate-access charge is unaffordable, but its deposit terms for the accepted version satisfy the mandate at no cost. The society journal's do not: its embargo exceeds the mandate's limit and there is no free-compliant route. That is a hard filter, and it removes what would have been the second rung.

*The judgement call.* An unfamiliar venue appears in a search: it publishes rapidly, is scoped to exactly this topic, and charges within reach of a small departmental fund. Screening finds four adverse signals: the indexing it claims is not shown at the index's own site; two of four board members cannot be found in the field; the fee appears only in the final paragraph of the author guidelines; and the stated review timeline is under three weeks. Three recent articles show no evidence of copy-editing and one is outside the stated scope entirely. Against that, the journal is genuinely new, which innocently explains the indexing gap on its own. The signals are cumulative and four point one way, so the candidate is dropped and the reasoning recorded rather than left as an impression. Flagged as a researcher decision rather than an automated one.

*Step 8.* Three rungs: the central venue first; a second field journal from Step 2 that is plausible-to-central and mandate-compliant; and a specialist evaluation journal third. Expected elapsed time if all three are needed is roughly eleven months, which fits inside fourteen only if the first submission goes out promptly. Stopping rule: if two reviews independently attack the causal reading of the referral finding, the paper goes back for revision rather than down the ladder, because that is the contribution.

*Step 9.* Preprint norms in this subfield are mixed and the target venue permits preprinting. Given the probation deadline and a related team working nearby, the researcher posts a preprint at submission and records it for disclosure.

**OUTPUT**

A ladder of three mandate-compliant venues, a top choice that the researcher had not considered and that publishes the exact conversation the paper joins, a documented decision to drop an outlet that would have cost money and standing, an anonymisation checklist, a preprint decision made deliberately, and a cover letter naming the recent paper the manuscript contests.

`RESEARCHER SIGN-OFF REQUIRED` before submission (K5 §2.8).

## 15. Advanced usage

**Choosing the venue before the study.** In fields with archival conferences, or where a special issue or a registered report route exists, the venue decision precedes the work and shapes it. Running Steps 1 to 4 at the design stage, on the intended contribution rather than the finished paper, produces a target that constrains scope and schedule productively. It also identifies where a registered report is possible, which converts a venue decision into a design decision. Works with **15.04 Research Proposal Writing**.

**Planning a venue portfolio rather than one submission.** Where a project will produce several papers, allocate venues across them deliberately: the methodological paper, the main empirical paper and the practice-facing paper usually belong in three different places, and deciding this early prevents the common outcome where all three are written for the same audience and two of them land badly. This pairs with the publication-set planning in **15.24 Journal Article Development**.

**Reading a desk rejection properly.** Desk rejections are short and usually formulaic, but the specific wording distinguishes three cases: not in scope (go elsewhere, unchanged), in scope but not competitive here (go down the ladder, unchanged), and in scope but the contribution is not clear (do not go anywhere yet, go back to **15.24**). Authors reliably read all three as the second. Where the letter is genuinely uninformative, the fallback is the fit evidence from Step 3, which usually contains the answer.

**Non-journal venues.** For some work the right home is not a journal: an edited collection, a monograph, a working paper series, a registered report, a data paper, a policy-facing report, or an archival conference. Assess these on the same four dimensions in Section 8. The most common mistake is defaulting to a journal article because it is the format that counts institutionally, even where the audience that needs the work does not read journals.

**Where the standard approach does not fit.** Where an author works in a language other than the dominant one in their field, the ladder has two dimensions rather than one, and the choice between a regional venue that reaches the community the work concerns and an international venue that reaches the discipline is a genuine trade with no general answer. State it as a trade rather than assuming the international venue is the better choice. Where an author is subject to institutional counting rules that conflict with reach, surface the conflict; do not resolve it silently in either direction.

## 16. Skill chain

**Recommended previous skills:**
- **15.24 Journal Article Development.** Hands over the finished manuscript and, critically, the one-sentence contribution claim that the fit assessment is run against.
- **15.13 Doctoral Research Positioning and Originality.** Hands over the positioning of the work within the field, which shapes which conversation the venue must be hosting.

**Recommended next skills:**
- **15.26 Peer Review Response.** Takes over the moment a decision letter arrives, and carries the confidentiality rules for manuscripts in review.
- **15.27 Conference Abstract and Presentation.** Takes over where the selected route is a conference, or runs alongside where the work is presented before publication.

**Runs well alongside:**
- **15.03 Referencing and Citation Management**, for the reference style each venue requires.
- **13.06 AI Research Governance**, which covers the AI use declarations increasingly required at submission.
- **13.02 Source and Citation Verification**, which is the same verification discipline applied to the paper's references that Step 7 applies to venues.

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A Yazi Supplied Skill and resource.