Nowadays, free online Journal Finder services are available to help authors to find a perfect Journal. Usually, we only need to enter our paper's abstract and sometimes title, then the services will automatically find best matches Journals (with similarity scores, impact factors, review time, production time, open access options and fee, etc.)
http://journalfinder.elsevier.com/
http://www.sjfinder.com/
http://www.edanzediting.com/journal_selector
https://www.springer.com/gp/authors-editors/journal-author/journal-author-helpdesk/preparation/1276
Recently, my students and I tried to find the most appropriate Journal to publish their works through these finders. We tried them all. From the results that are said as the good matches, however, we found that some of those are actually irrelevant to our works.
I began questioning: What algorithm they used (basic term-document frequency counting or else)? How deep is the search (how many n-grams)? How large is the input database? Which one is the best in providing the best matches answers? How can we evaluate them? Can RG provide a good Journal Finder that is both transparent and gives good matches?
Off course, Elsevier only find Elsevier Journals, whereas Springer only find Springer Journals. But using other service, I also found one questionable (predatory) journal in the results. Could this mislead the authors instead of helping them?
Hope RG friends have some answers or information to share on these matters.
In case of Elsevier Journals Finder a bit of information on How it works is stated here:
https://www.elsevier.com/authors-update/story/apps-and-technology/the-new,-improved-version-of-journal-finder-is-now-live
It said:
"The software behind Journal Finder, applies NLP and different research-specific keyword vocabularies to analyze the text you have entered and transform it into a unique fingerprint – a distinct visual index of keywords and a weighted list of structured terms.
Journal Finder then compares the fingerprint of your title and abstract with the fingerprints of all articles in Scopus linking you to the 200 most relevant articles across Elsevier journals. As a final step, Journal Finder recommends up to 10 of the most relevant journals for you to consider. That list can be ordered according to your priorities, such as by highest Impact Factor or shortest editorial time. If you wish your paper to be freely accessible to others, you can also filter the results to show only journals with open access options. "
Now the questions down to: What are the research-specific keyword vocabularies? are they relevant to the given abstract and title? So the Scopus provides the index, so is this limited to the Scopus (or other) indexed Journals?
Dear Mohamad, most search engines and databases, including the ones you mentioned above and also Google Scholar, etc. are full of mistakes because they are just engines. In my opinion, it is better for the authors to put 3-4 relevant key words on the google (e.g. journal, tourism, sustainability) and then visit the journals' websites one by one so as to get a more complete and better idea about their quality. This is certainly a time consuming and "old-fashioned" method but you get better results. However, even this method doesn't mean that you get the perfect answer to your paper! You might submit your article to a journal and then wait for several months till you receive an answer (which is many times negative) or, if you are lucky enough, your paper needs one or two revisions!
If you finally manage to identify the perfect journal finder and/or journal please inform me as well! I wish you all the best!
I think your students should read the following article instead of looking for such journal finders:
What is the best database for computer science journal articles? By Antonio Cavacini. DOI 10.1007/s11192-014-1506-1
Scientometrics
Dear Irfan Ullah,
Thank you very much for your post. Actually, not only my students, me and other researchers are certainly would be helped by the article. I already request for fulltext paper to the author.
Sincerely,
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