The target journal: choosing the right place to submit your paper

摘要

After having written a wonderful paper, full of interesting ideas, fascinating data and exhaustive statistics you make a terrible mistake: you send it to the wrong journal. What does ‘the wrong journal’ mean? For many it would be a journal with an unsatisfactory impact factor. In my opinion, it is a journal where you will not have any interested readers. Impact factor is, of course, crucial as it looks good on your CV and can earn you research funds, but citation will only occur, at least in most cases, when you are read with interest by fellow professionals from your own specific field of biomedicine. Choosing the right place to submit your paper is therefore the first thing you have to do, even before you actually start bashing it out on your computer keyboard. You might feel that your paper is of fundamental importance to the biomedical community, but it is always a good idea to be realistic and aim for a journal that is within your reach. What I mean is, if you are convinced of the quality and importance of your paper, and also feel that it could be of interest to a particular group of readers, then by all means submit it to a high-impact-factor journal. For example, who wouldn’t like to be published in the New England Journal of Medicine? What you have to remember is that the NEJM receives around 4,000 papers a year yet only has the chance to publish around 450 of them. The selection process is extremely severe, therefore, and your paper really does have to be out-of-the-ordinary and of extreme relevance to the journal’s reading population to even begin going through the peer-review process. Submitting a paper that is even slightly below this level would mean immediate rejection (NEJM normally rejects within one week when they are not interested), so think carefully about where you decide to send your manuscript. In any case, the destination of your paper is known as the target journal. As I said at the beginning, your target journal does not necessarily need to have a high impact factor, but must guarantee you a reading population. The next thing to remember is that you can only send your paper to one journal at a time. Stick to your specialty and even try contacting the Editor via e-mail before submitting your paper to find out whether or not he will consider publishing it, based on its subject matter. This can save you time, sometimes a lot of time. When you have chosen the journal be sure to follow its Instructions to Authors. Although more than 500 journals use the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals (http://www.icmje.org/), also known as the Vancouver Document, each journal will also have its own set of rules and regulations. Uniform requirements include:-the use of double spacing throughout the text-the necessity to use the standard IMRAD (Introduction, Methods, Results And Discussion) format-the sequence to be used: title page - abstract - key words and abbreviations - text - acknowledgements - references - tables and figures - legends Specific requirements might include:- the use of abbreviations-the type of spelling to use (American or British English)-the maximum length of the paperSo, remember:-choose a journal that is relevant to your specialty to guarantee you an audience-choose the target journal realistically as you can only submit your work to one journal at a time: inevitable rejection means delayed publication-get in touch with the editor of your target journal beforehand to see whether your work might be of interest or not.Finally, if you are convinced that your paper deserves to be published in the NEJM then don’t worry about the 90% rejection rate and send it to them as your target journal. He who dares sometimes wins. There’s no harm in trying.