Research intelligence can help decide where to publish research papers by identifying relevant journals that you can then shortlist for consideration, and it is recommended that you complete this process yourself rather than use whitelists. ThinkCheckSubmit has useful checklists that can help you to decide: http://thinkchecksubmit.org/check/ To summarise the process, you can begin searching for journals that cover your research area in a number of ways:
Publications You Cite: the journals you cite regularly in your research.
Researchers You Know: where the researchers you collaborate with or are prominent in your field publish.
Topic Search: searching on databases like Scopus or Google Scholar using keywords and filters, or use topics and topic clusters in SciVal.
From the shortlist of journals found in this way, you can then begin to evaluate them. Any evaluation of a journal should firstly include:
Audience and Reputation: whether the journal is widely read and well regarded in your field.
Access and Indexing: whether the journal publishes under the open access model you require or is indexed in the databases you want to appear on.
https://service.elsevier.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/11274/c/10547/supporthub/scopus/
Peer Review: whether the form of peer review and criteria used meets your needs.
Editorial Board: whether the editorial board contains leading researchers you are interested in submitting work to.
Journal Metrics can help make final decisions on evaluations of where to publish when all of the above has been exhausted. These include:
Journal Impact Factor (JIF): This takes the citations received in 1 year to documents published in that journal over the past 2 years, divided by the number of documents in that journal in the last 2 years. Documents published earlier in the yearly cycle will have more time to accrue citations, and this metric favours review articles which are more highly cited.
http://help.incites.clarivate.com/incitesLiveJCR/glossaryAZgroup/g8/4346-TRS.html
https://www.metrics-toolkit.org/journal-impact-factor/
CiteScore: This is very similar to the JIF however the scope is increased from 2 years to 3, and it will therefore retain the limitations of the JIF.
https://service.elsevier.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/14880/c/10547/supporthub/scopus/
Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP): This takes the journal’s citation count per paper and divides it by the expected number of citations for a paper in that field. Subjects that generally receive less citations will mean a single citation carries more weight using this metric.
https://service.elsevier.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/14884/supporthub/scopus/
Scimago Journal Rank (SJR): Here citations are ‘weighted’ according to the ranking of the journal, and then the average number of these weighted citations over one year are divided by the number of documents published in the previous 3 years. Journal rankings tell very little about the quality of the individual papers published in them.
https://service.elsevier.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/14883/c/10547/supporthub/scopus/
https://www.scimagojr.com/