Finding a journal to publish in

[Richard]

Elsevier has a tool that helps you find the 'right' journal for your research: http://journalfinder.elsevier.com/ You copy in your title and abstract, and set the general academic field. It then gives you a list of suitable Elsevier journals (together with useful info like acceptance rates).

I tried this by putting in what I'm going to present at DRAL. The top 5 journals it suggested are:
English for Specific Purposes (acceptance rate: 19%)
Journal of Second Language Writing (8%)
Computers and Composition (53%)
Journal of English for Academic Purposes (14%)
Russian Literature (no figure given)

Not sure about the last one, but these seem reasonable results. If anyone tries this for real, let me know if it's useful.

[sgtowns]

I tried this with my upcoming DRAL paper, and it was mostly a failure. The top results were:

* English for Specific Purposes
* Journal of Second Language Writing
* Journal of English for Academic Purposes
* Journal of Memory and Language
* Language Sciences

Maybe the general Language Sciences would work, but the paper definitely doesn't have anything to do with ESP, L2 writing, EAP, or memory.

My latest conference paper from a couple years ago had similar results:

* Journal of Second Language Writing
* Russian Literature (?!?!)
* English for Specific Purposes
* Computers and Composition
* Journal of English for Academic Purposes

Again, this paper has nothing to do with L2 writing, ESP, or EAP -- and it's definitely not Russian Literature! But the suggestion for Computers and Composition is an interesting one and is probably the best choice in the lists for both of these papers. I had never heard of this journal before, but it might be useful for future publications. So maybe 1 recommendation out of 7 is OK if that one recommendation is a good one.

Perhaps though, these results also might tell me that my methodology and the topics that I have been investigating are good matches for ESP, EAP, or L2 writing journals. I would just need to collect new data in these fields and then I could investigate my topics of interest in other kinds of writing. So maybe this website is a useful tool for thinking about how our research interests can be tweaked and expanded to fit into fields that we haven't considered before.

Stuart

[stevelouw]

I tried it with my upcoming DRAL paper, and the results are most promising!

- Teaching and teacher education (100%)
- Journal of social studies research (96%)
- System (55%)
- Studies in educational evaluation (53%)
- Linguistics and education (53%)

I am rather disappointed not to have got Russian literature, as that seems to be popular.