How the suggestions are made

Journal Suggestor pulls out the phrases and terms that best describe your manuscript, then looks for related articles and groups them by journal. Recent articles carry slightly more weight. A journal also gains strength when it matches several parts of the manuscript rather than one broad phrase. The strongest result receives a fit index of 100, and the other scores are scaled against it. Every suggestion includes the phrases and articles behind the match, so you can judge the evidence yourself.

What is OpenAlex?

OpenAlex is an open catalog of scholarly works, authors, journals, institutions, and research topics. Its data is available under the CC0 public-domain dedication. Journal Suggestor uses this catalog to find related articles and retrieve public journal metadata. It does not include or redistribute proprietary journal databases.

Daily access limit

OpenAlex sets a daily allowance for API access, and one manuscript search can require several requests. The site can therefore support only a limited number of searches each day. If the allowance runs out, Journal Suggestor will explain what happened and pause new searches until access resets.

Guideline to identify journal quality

This short workflow is adapted from Ranjan et al. (2026). Use it to structure your judgment, not to certify a journal.

1. Verify indexing at the source. Check current records in Scopus or Scimago, Web of Science, and DOAJ instead of relying on the journal’s own claims.
2. Check every reported metric. Values such as SJR, CiteScore, and Journal Impact Factor should match the corresponding official source.
3. Look at how the journal operates. Warning signs include guaranteed rapid publication, unverifiable editors, an implausibly broad scope, hidden fees, weak contact information, copied text, title mimicry, and a vague peer-review process.
4. Consider the evidence together. A new journal may not yet be indexed, so absence from a bibliometric database is not enough on its own. Combine indexing, metrics, and qualitative evidence before reaching a conclusion.

Privacy

Journal Suggestor does not store your title, abstract, or other search text. The creators and authors do not receive it and cannot see what you enter. Your browser sends the query to the site’s Netlify Function, which adds the API key and forwards the request to OpenAlex without logging or retaining the manuscript text. OpenAlex’s privacy policy explains how it handles API requests.

The site uses Google Analytics for simple usage statistics, such as the number of visitors, the features they use, and their approximate country or region. Journal Suggestor never sends manuscript text, shortlisted journals, or checklist responses to Google Analytics. Analytics runs only if you allow it in the small notice, and the site remains fully usable if you decline. When allowed, Google Analytics uses first-party cookies to distinguish visitors and sessions. You can change your choice below, block cookies in your browser, or block Analytics with an ad blocker such as uBlock Origin, which is the creator’s default choice.

Change analytics choice

Your theme, shortlist, and analytics choice are stored only in your browser.

Questions, errors, and feature requests

Found a problem, spotted something that looks wrong, or have an idea for the site? Report an error, raise a concern, or request a feature on GitHub.

Research basis and citation

Journal Suggestor accompanies How to identify an appropriate journal for your manuscript: a predictive modeling approach by Pritam Ranjan, Reshu Agarwal and M. Harshvardhan, which develops predictive models for journal authenticity and the quality guideline summarized above.

If the tool helps your work, please cite the working paper:

@unpublished{ranjan2026journal,
  author = {Ranjan, Pritam and Agarwal, Reshu and Harshvardhan, M.},
  title = {How to identify an appropriate journal for your manuscript: A predictive modeling approach},
  year = {2026},
  note = {Working paper}
}

What the tool cannot tell you

The underlying catalog indexes journals; it does not certify them. A fit score is a measure of topical similarity, not an endorsement. A journal can look active in the data and still fail the qualitative checks, so use the checklist before submitting. You should also verify Scopus and Web of Science coverage directly because those records cannot be redistributed here. Finally, the matching depends on words: a very short abstract, or one dominated by notation, will usually produce weaker results.

Credits

Built by Harshvardhan (American University of Sharjah) as an open research tool. The source code is available under the MIT license. OpenAlex calculates the h-index and two-year mean citedness from its own citation graph.