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What you get

A shortlist of journals that publish your kind of work, each with how many closely-related papers they carry, their SCImago quartile, and representative papers you can read to judge fit.

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Who it’s for

Researchers choosing a submission target — especially early-career authors, and anyone publishing into a field they are new to. A mis-targeted submission costs a months-long rejection cycle before you learn anything.

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How it works

1

Search as if you were looking for your own paper

Query the specific contribution, not the broad topic. “Machine learning in healthcare” returns the wrong venues; “transformer models for ICU mortality prediction” returns the ones that would review you.
2

Sweep deep, not wide

Paginate. The venue distribution in the top 20 results is noisier than across 200, and specialist journals surface further down.
3

Tally journals with quartiles

Count journal_name across the deduplicated set, carrying sjr_best_quartile and publisher_name. Frequency tells you where this conversation happens; quartile tells you how hard the door is.
4

Split by recency

Rank once over five years and once over the last eighteen months. A journal that published heavily in 2019 and nothing since has moved on from the topic.
5

Read three papers per candidate

Fit is about framing and method, not keywords. The representative papers are the point of the exercise.

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The API call

Then aggregate client-side:
Add open_access=true if your funder mandates OA, and sjr_max=1 to see only the top-quartile subset — but look at the unfiltered list first, or you will miss the specialist venue that is the actual best fit.

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What to check before you trust it

  • Frequency is not acceptance probability. The journal publishing the most papers in your area may also reject the most. Use the list to build a realistic ladder — a reach, two solid targets, a fallback.
  • Check scope pages by hand. Journals shift scope, launch sections, and close them. The literature lags those changes by a year or more.
  • Watch for a topic sitting mostly in conferences. In fast-moving computational fields the venue that matters may not be a journal at all, and journal-only tallies will mislead you.
  • Quartile is a blunt instrument. SCImago quartiles vary by subject category; a Q2 in a narrow specialist category can be more selective than a Q1 in a broad one.

Find a real citation for every claim in a draft

Get the manuscript itself defensible before you submit it.

Track how a field's terminology changed over time

Make sure you are searching the terms this field actually uses.

Best practices

Exhaustive sweep and the rest of the primitives.

All use cases

Browse the gallery by persona.