Journal Due Diligence Part III: Journal Finders

By Leslie H. Nicoll, PhD, MBA, RN, FAAN

Writer’s Camp Director

An evaluation of journal finders suggests that their utility is limited.

Journal due diligence (JDD), as I have described it,1,2 is a manual process. You need to do the work of looking for potential journals, visiting their websites, searching for information, writing it down, and then doing a compare/contrast. Done well, JDD will take some time. I said earlier that I find it fun, but there are times when I am in a hurry and wish I could speed up the process. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could enter some basic information, press a button, and come up with a list of journals that are appropriate for your manuscript? “Journal finders” exist so this isn’t a pipe dream. But the big question is, do they work? Let’s talk about that.

Basics for All Journal Finders

All the various journal finders promise that they will come up with a list of potential journals that are promoted as a good fit. Exactly how good is up to you to evaluate. Depending on the application, you enter some combination of your manuscript title, abstract, and keywords. You may be able to enter the full-text of your manuscript or references. The matcher then compares the information you provided against a list of journals culled from various databases. Many journal finders are created by publishers, and the results returned are the journals of that publisher, i.e., that’s the database that is searched. Others search MEDLINE, Scopus, CrossRef, the Web of Science Core Collection, Journal Citation Reports, Emerging Sources Citation Index, or the Arts and Humanities Citation Index. I was not able to find any applications that include CINAHL (the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature) in its list of databases searched. This, unfortunately, can result in a bias against nursing journals and content. Realizing this, proceed with caution.

Using these applications is easy, which is a large part of their appeal. After entering your information, press “search” and journal information is returned to you, usually in seconds. At a minimum, it will give you journal titles and some sort of rating score. More comprehensive results, including various metrics (acceptance rate, time for review, journal impact factor, and so on), and contact information for the journal with a link to the website may be provided. The number of journals returned varies, from none to thousands.

Giving a Variety of Journal Finders a Test

For this article, I decided to test several journal finders. I used the title, abstract, or keywords for a previously published article.3 The article was indexed in MEDLINE, Scopus, and CINAHL. Given this, I would expect the journal where it was published to show up in the results—at least for the all-purpose journal finders (i.e., not publisher-specific).

To start, I entered the title into the Clarivate Manuscript Matcher, which advertises that its manuscript matcher will find “the best relevant journals!” It came back with 1,101 results, sorted by relevancy. The first journal on the list was 3L-Language Linguistics Literature-The Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies. This is a Malaysian open access journal with an article processing charge of $300. It is published quarterly by the press of a Malaysian university. Scanning through the table of contents for the most recent issue, I do not see any authors with American-sounding names, and none appear to be nurses. The topics are not health related. While it was interesting reading about this journal and learning it exists, I do not understand why it came back as the most relevant choice for a manuscript on retracted articles in the nursing literature.

Also, even though the results were sorted by relevancy, the list appeared to be in alphabetical order. It also seemed to include every single nursing journal that is published and did not seem to be filtering the results. The Journal of Nursing Scholarship was on the list—in between the Journal of Nursing Research and the Journal of Pediatric Hematology-Oncology Nursing. If I wanted global results of nursing publications, I could just look at the Directory of Nursing Journals.

Next, I planned to test the EndNote Manuscript Matcher but I discovered that since I am not an EndNote user I could not evaluate this application firsthand. However, EndNote is owned by Clarivate, so it is essentially the Clarivate Manuscript Matcher with EndNote branding, and I suspect the results will be the same as noted above. One nice feature: you can access the manuscript matcher from within Word, if you are using EndNote to format the references in your paper. A vote for convenience!

The next all-purpose journal finder was Researcher.Life by Editage. This application requires some sort of membership for full functionality but I was able to log in using a free account. This application searches “43k+ journals indexed in CrossRef, Directory of Open Access Journals, Scopus, and Web of Science.” You can search using the abstract or complete manuscript. I pasted in the abstract from our article.3 The results were 35 journals, sorted by “good to average degree of match.” First on the list was the Annals of Thoracic Surgery followed by the South African Journal of Oncology. I paged through all 35 and the Journal of Nursing Scholarship was not on the list, even though it is included in Scopus and the Web of Science.

Publisher-Specific Journal Finders

Next up, journal finders created by publishing companies. I started with Wiley’s Journal Finder. This time, in addition to the title, I also included the abstract, which is required. The search came back with this notification: “Sorry, but we were unable to generate any results. To find relevant journals, you can browse our publications directly.” Remember, I was searching using information for an already published article—and the article was published in the Journal of Nursing Scholarship, which is published by…(wait for it)…Wiley! So why didn’t the journal show up? That’s a very good question, and I don’t have an answer.

Continuing with the publisher specific journal finders, I moved on to Elsevier. I had the option to search by the abstract or by “keywords, aims & scope, journal title, etc…” (I wonder what “etc” encompasses, but I digress.) When I used the abstract, the search came back with 40 matching journals. The first was Nurse Education Today and the second was Nurse Leader. These are both journals that I am familiar with, and they are not entirely out of the realm of possibility. I might put these on my list for further investigation. I repeated the search, this time with the article title and there were zero matching journals. Using the keywords “retracted articles, nursing, publication” also came back with zilch.

Finally, I went to the Taylor & Francis Journal Suggester. For this application, the full abstract was required. Number one on the list was Science & Technology Libraries, a journal that “publishes research that concerns the profession of librarians serving science, engineering, health, and agriculture.” Delving in and doing a little bit more research, including reading the editorial from the new Editor-in-Chief, I decided that this journal wasn’t as outlandish as some of the other choices that have been suggested. Still, with a 5% acceptance rate, I don’t think this is the journal where I want to try to break new ground.

Stop and Think

At this point, I want you to take a step back and do a little thinking with me. Ask yourself this broad question: “Why do I want to publish this manuscript?” You may have several reasons, including “adding to my CV” or “for my promotion and tenure dossier.” Those aren’t bad reasons and you’re being honest. But I would hope that high on your list is your desire to communicate your research or information to other nurses with the expectation that this material could be useful to them in their scholarship, research, or practice. Recognizing this, exactly how many nurses are going to find your article in 3L or Science & Technology Libraries? While Smith4 has noted that everything can be published somewhere, and many studies are never cited and quickly forgotten, I would hope that you would aim higher and try to publish in a journal that you think your nurse colleagues will read.

A mark of a scholar is a comfortable familiarity with the published literature in your area of specialization. You should be able to discuss, from memory, relevant information and related studies that support your ideas and beliefs. In nursing education language, this may be thought of as “scaffolding.” Learners are expected to carry knowledge from one course to the next, all the time building on what they have learned. Part of this knowledge includes remembering what you have read and where. Therefore, when you begin your JDD, you should start with journals you are reading regularly that publish articles relevant to your work. You will branch out from there and you may come across new-to-you journals as part of the JDD process. But I don’t think that going way outside of nursing and latching on to totally unknown publications is a wise approach.

What About JANE?

Are you getting the sense that I am not a huge fan of journal finders? If so, you are not wrong. But I keep finding and testing them because, like a search for the Holy Grail, I am hoping that one day the perfect journal finder will pop up.

Which brings me to JANE. I mention this because people ask me about JANE all the time. JANE stands for Journal/Author Name Estimator. As far as I can tell, JANE is a labor of love that is maintained by Martijn Schuemie and hosted by Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI). Martijn is a big data researcher and OHDSI collaborator; he works at Johnson & Johnson. Nowhere in his professional profile does he mention JANE. My guess (and this is just a guess) is that when he was starting out, way back in 2007, he created JANE for himself and his colleagues to make their JDD process easier. He probably wrote the code for JANE in a day or two. He put it up on the OHDSI website and there it sits. Martijn probably looks at hits on the site every now and then and is amazed at how many people use his “little thing” that he developed years ago. That prompts an update—and then he forgets about it again for another few months.

Like the other journal finders, JANE gives you the choice to input your title, abstract, or keywords. JANE uses data from PubMed and the Directory of Open Access Journals. The latter is included to try to avoid predatory journals, some of which are included in PubMed. Using my same test, I entered my article title3 and received 36 results. The first was BioMed Research International. With JANE you can look at the articles in the journal that match your search item. The match in BioMed Research International showed 5 articles, all with the word “nursing” in the title, that had been retracted. The next two journals had similar results—lists of retracted articles with nursing in the title. What was going on?

Digging a little deeper, I found that these 3 journals were all published by Wiley. Wiley acquired Hindawi in 2021, and at the time of acquisition, it was discovered that thousands of Hindawi published papers were flawed, due to compromised peer review and issues related to paper mills.5 To date, more than 11,000 articles have been retracted,6 and the process is ongoing. Good for Wiley for doing the right thing by retracting all these articles, but I must wonder if buying Hindawi was the best business decision for the company. Whatever—these 3 journals are not ones I will consider for publication so the search is, once again, pointless.

Okay, back to JANE. This time I entered the whole abstract and first on the list was the Journal of Nursing Scholarship, the journal where we published our article. Think about this for a second: I have done 8 searches in different journal finders, and this is the first time that the results came back with the actual journal we used for publication. In fact, even in JANE the journal didn’t show up until fifth on the list when I entered just the article title. Doesn’t that tell you something? The strangest of all were the results from the Wiley Journal Finder, which came up with zero journals even though the article was published in a Wiley journal. I question how reliable any of these journal finders are. Also, as I write this, I spent about 3 hours going down this rabbit hole of searching and finding information. While it was an interesting process, if I was actually trying to find a journal for publication, I would be annoyed with how little progress I made for time invested.

Conclusion

If you really want to use some sort of computerized search to begin your JDD, this is what I suggest:

  1. Select an article that you have published in your area of interest. If that doesn’t exist, then find an article that really resonates with you.
  2. Search on this article in MEDLINE/PubMed.
  3. Scroll down to “Similar Articles.”
  4. See what journals are listed. Are any of them a good starting point?

PubMed has the advantage of being fast, comprehensive, and free. It might give you an idea or two or it may be a bust, but you won’t have wasted a lot of time.

All this searching and experimenting with different applications has reinforced that my JDD process, which I came up with back in 2011 and have polished since then, works and is effective. It is also a very important part of the Manuscript Success process. Take the time to do your journal research, using a variety of the strategies that I have described in this series of articles.1,2 Complete the JDD worksheets, which I have pasted here again for convenience. Come up with your first, second, and third choices and be able to confidently say why they are the right picks for your manuscript. If you do this, you will have a good start for your publishing journey and hopefully avoid the dreaded “desk rejection” because your paper is “not the right fit” for a journal.

Next up: Selecting a template article and Template Article Analysis (TAA).

References

  1. Nicoll L. Manuscript Success: Journal Due Diligence Part II, Special Considerations. The Writer’s Camp Journal. 2025;1. doi:10.5281/ZENODO.15620094
  2. Nicoll LH. Manuscript Success: Journal Due Diligence Part I, The Process. The Writer’s Camp Journal. 2025;1(1):10. doi:10.5281/ZENODO.15570045
  3. Nicoll LH, Carter-Templeton H, Oermann MH, et al. An Examination of Retracted Articles in Nursing Literature. Journal of Nursing Scholarship. 2024;56(3):478-485. doi:10.1111/jnu.12952
  4. Smith R. Classical Peer Review: An Empty Gun. Breast Cancer Research. 2010;12 Suppl 4:S13. doi:10.1186/bcr2742
  5. Van Noorden R. More Than 10,000 Research Papers Were Retracted in 2023 – A New Record. Nature. 2023;624(7992):479-481. doi:10.1038/d41586-023-03974-8
  6. Orrall A. Wiley Journal Retracts Over 200 More Papers. Retraction Watch. March 31, 2025. Accessed June 14, 2025. https://retractionwatch.com/2025/03/31/wiley-international-wound-journal-retracts-over-200-more-papers/

Journal Due Diligence Worksheet 3 Journals

Journal Due Diligence Worksheet 1 Journal

By Leslie H. Nicoll

Edited by Peggy Chinn, Heather Carter-Templeton, and Marilyn Oermann

©2025, Writer’s Camp and Leslie H. Nicoll. CC-BY-ND 4.0

Citation: Nicoll, LH. Manuscript Success: Journal Due Diligence Part III, Journal Finders. The Writer’s Camp Journal, 2025;1(1):14. doi:10.5281/zenodo.15668413

One thought on “Journal Due Diligence Part III: Journal Finders”

  1. Thank you for sharing this! What stood out most to me is how easy it is to bypass the journals we instinctively reach for when we want to feel grounded, challenged, or inspired. In chasing a “perfect fit,” we sometimes forget the journals that already feel like home, where our voices might naturally belong. This is a great reminder that starting with what we already read and trust often tells us more than any algorithm ever could. Just as importantly, we need to keep reminding nursing learners that reading widely in our areas of interest is part of becoming a scholar. I know I cannot be the only one guilty of, at times, reading for the sake of citations for assignments, and forgetting to slow down and recognize the way a journal speaks to me, feels familiar, or might someday be the right place to share my own voice.

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