Radiation Oncology

Finding Appropriate Journals (and Vetting Suspicious Ones)

Finding an appropriate journal to publish your work ensures that your research will be discoverable and have an impact in your field.

New journals and new publishers are being launched annually, so there is no hard list of appropriate, reputable journals.

Before you submit your articles to a journal, consider speaking to your librarian or using the following resource:

Publish Where Others Will Reference Your Research

The impact factor of a journal is a measurement that reflects the average number of times that articles in a particular journal have been cited.

• This measurement is often used to estimate the relative importance of a journal in its particular science or social science field.
• The measurement is based on data from the previous two years, so new journals will have low impact factors due to the small amount of available data.

A higher impact factor predicts that your research is more discoverable and more likely to be shared widely in the field if you publish in that journal. However

• for early career researchers, journals with lower impact factors might be more reasonable places to publish as they are less competitive than the more well-known journals and can still be vetted as reputable
• for very specialized areas of research with small pools of global researchers, journals will always have smaller impact factors, as fewer people are citing this more specialized work

Please note: Not all journals are included in JCR and so every journal may not have an impact factor. There are also many other considerations for determining the importance and quality of a journal beyond the impact factor.

Publish Where Others Will Find Your Research

Can the journal be found in key biomedical databases? 

• PubMed
• Embase
• Web of Science

Different database index different journals, so it is not a red flag if a journal is only found in one database

If you are looking for an appropriate journal to publish, search the databases to see where similar articles--in terms of content and article type--have been published in the past (and how recently)

Because of PubMed Central (PMC), not all articles in PubMed are in journals indexed in PubMed​

• If you click on the journal name in PubMed and search for the journal in the NLM catalog, you can check the index status

Publish Where Your Work Makes Sense

Does this journal fit your work?

• scope of the journal
• types of articles the journal accepts
• article requirements for word count, amount of images, number of authors, etc,

When reviewing the journal's Author Guidelines, look for:

• major misspellings, strange syntax, or dead links
• stated costs for submission or publication, as well as vague "fees"

If you are interested in publishing open access, consider the available open access discounts offered through UF. More information here:

If you are interested in publishing open access, check these databases to find relevant reputable journals. 

Always make sure the open access journal you chose is indexed in the databases appropriate to your profession. Please reach out to your liaison librarian if you have any additional questions about open access.