Selecting the journal(s) to send your manuscript to is an important part of the academic publishing process. Here are the main criteria to consider:

Circulation Statistics

The best place to find the circulation numbers for prospective journals is often on the website of the journal itself. Ask a Librarian if you need help!

Journal acceptance rates yield important statistical information about the selectivity of a journal.

Some good places to check for journal acceptance rates are:

• The website for the journal itself to see if the acceptance rates are provided.
• Article databases specific to your discipline may include articles written on the quality of certain journals and their acceptance rates. For example, check PsycINFO for Psychology, CINAHL with Full Text for Nursing, or Engineering Source for Engineering. For a complete list of databases, click here.

By Discipline

The resources listed below contain information on acceptance rates for scholarly journals in specific disciplines. If your discipline is not listed below, consult Cabell's or ask a librarian for more help!

Economics & Finance

• IDEAS/RePEc Simple Impact Factors for Journals: These rankings covers journals, book series, book chapter series, working paper series, and software component series that are indexed in RePEc. The citation ranks are updated daily and cover all items according to several ways of counting citations. Also provides summary rankings that aggregate the various criteria, and allows you to download raw data for the citation rankings.

Education & Library Science

• The Journals in the Field of Instructional Technology: Comprehensive list of topics covered, content, circulation, months to review, and average lengths of articles. 

English

Nursing & Health Administration

Psychology

• Journal Statistics and Operations Data​ from the American Psychology Association. Provides information about manuscript rejection rates, circulation data, publication lag time, and other journal statistics.

Determining a Journal's Prestige

In considering the prestige of a journal, two common factors are considered:

1. Impact factor 
2. Immediacy Index.

In addition, in the sciences, the Eigenfactor may also play a part.

Finding Prestige Stats

• Science Watch
  This open-web resource uses data from the Thomson Reuters Web of Science to periodically publish journal impact reports for disciplines.  To see a report, go to search box on website and type "journals ranked" to see a list of prepared reports.
• Google Scholar Metrics
  Rankings display include the h5-index and the h5-median for each included publication. To learn more about Google Scholar Metrics and its use of h5-index, go to its explanatory page. To search in Google Scholar Metrics, click here and then type in the journal name on top. You can also browse by category, i.e. Social Sciences, Life Sciences & Earth Sciences, Health & Medical Sciences, etc.
• Scimago Journal Rank
  The SCImago Journal & Country Rank is a portal that includes the journals and country scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus database (Elsevier B.V.). These indicators can be used to assess and analyze scientific domains.This platform takes its name from the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) indicator, developed by SCImago from the widely known algorithm Google PageRank™. This indicator shows the visibility of the journals contained in the Scopus database from 1996.
• CiteScore
  A new metric produced by Elsevier as part of Scopus. See this article for details about how the score is produced and what the limitations of it are.