GalterGuides: Choosing a Journal: Finding Relevant Journals

Finding Relevant Journals

Finding relevant journals may be a multi-step process: there are lots of databases and journal selection tools that can guide that process.

It is a good idea to ask a mentor or colleague if they know of any journals you should consider. Also, you may ask a librarian for recommendations for any topic-specific databases that you can mine for journal ideas.

Databases

You can use one or more well-known databases to create a list of journals, including Google Scholar, PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus.

Make sure you are on the Northwestern VPN to access the full versions of databases subscribed to by Galter Library

Database	Item Count and Content Coverage	Link	Availability
Google Scholar by Google	389M records - articles, books, theses, abstracts, court opinions, etc.	https://scholar.google.com/	Full free version
PubMed by US National Library of Medicine	36M records - 5,200 MedLine journals, life sciences journals from PubMed Central, books from NCB Bookshelf	https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/	Limited article full text; Galter Library full version
Scopus by Elsevier	94M records - 7K publishers, 330K books, 23.4M open access items, 29.2K journals	http://www.scopus.com/search/form.uri?display=basic#basic	Limited free version; Galter Library full version
Web of Science by Clarivate Analytics	217M records - 143K books, 304K conferences, 13M datasets, 59M patents, 34K journals	https://www.webofscience.com/wos/woscc/basic-search	Limited free version; Galter full version

Google Scholar This link opens in a new window
Google Scholar searches academic publishers, professional societies and pre-print archives.
PubMed This link opens in a new window
PubMed MEDLINE was developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). It was developed in conjunction with publishers of biomedical literature as a search tool for accessing literature citations and linking to full-text journals at web sites of participating publishers.
Scopus This link opens in a new window
Scopus is the world's largest abstract and citation database, including peer-reviewed titles from international publishers, Open Access journals, conference proceedings, trade publications, quality web sources.
Web of Science This link opens in a new window
Multidisciplinary coverage of over 10,000 journals in the sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities, as well as published proceedings for over 12,000 conferences per year, and over 50,000 scholarly books. Allows searching for articles in the database that have cited a particular work, as well as perform other analytics.