Factors Driving Journal Choice Among Health Professions Education Authors

Health professions education, the academic field that studies how clinicians are trained and assessed, has a distinct journal landscape and a distinct set of pressures on where authors choose to submit, separate from those of the biomedical and clinical-science literatures alongside which the field sits. A dedicated international survey of health professions education authors examined this question directly, investigating how journal characteristics, manuscript fit, and the author’s career stage and institutional context combine to shape journal choice in this field, rather than assuming that findings from general biomedical publishing surveys would transfer without adjustment.

Survey design and respondents

The survey, published as “A method for the madness: an international survey of health professions education authors’ journal choice”, was designed specifically to capture the journal-selection priorities of researchers publishing in health professions education, a field whose journals, audience and career incentives differ meaningfully from those of general biomedical or clinical research1. The survey was distributed internationally to corresponding authors who had published in health professions education journals, who were asked to rate the influence of a structured set of journal and manuscript characteristics, as well as personal and institutional factors, on their most recent journal-selection decision1. The authors explicitly positioned their work in relation to prior general-publishing surveys, noting that a field-specific instrument was needed because health professions education involves a distinct mix of specialist and generalist journals, differing review cultures, and its own debates about what “impact” should mean for education-focused scholarship1.

Precedence of scope and audience fit over impact factor

Among the factors rated, confidence that a manuscript was a strong fit for a journal’s stated scope and typical readership was more influential than the journal’s numerical metrics, including impact factor, in determining where authors ultimately chose to submit1. Authors in the field reported considering whether a journal’s typical audience (educators, education researchers or clinician-educators) was the group most likely to find and act on their specific findings, a consideration that a single numerical ranking does not capture1. This finding is broadly consistent with general guidance on journal selection in biomedicine, which likewise treats audience and scope fit as a fundamental, verifiable criterion that is distinct from, and precedes, any metrics-based comparison between journals2, but the health professions education survey provides field-specific confirmation that this pattern holds even where “impact”, in the sense of changing how trainees are taught or assessed, is more difficult to capture in a conventional citation-based metric than in a field concerned with clinical outcomes1.

The separate influence of institutional and national ranking systems

A distinct layer of influence identified by the survey arose not from the authors’ own priorities but from external institutional and national evaluation systems that use journal rankings, such as national research assessment exercises or university promotion criteria, to judge research output1. Authors reported pressure from these systems to target higher-ranked journals even when a lower-ranked, more specialized education journal might have reached the more directly relevant audience for a given study, creating a tension between the author’s own judgment of fit and the metrics-based incentives that the institution or national system applies to the author’s output1. This pattern reflects a broader, well-documented concern in the research-evaluation literature: the Leiden Manifesto for research metrics explicitly warns against using journal-level metrics such as impact factor as a proxy for the quality of an individual article or researcher, because doing so can lead authors to select journals for their ranking rather than for their fit with the intended audience3.

Implications for authors in this field

For authors publishing in health professions education, the practical implication is that constructing a shortlist on the basis of audience and scope fit first, and then weighing institutional ranking pressures as a separate, explicit consideration, corresponds more closely both to what practitioners in the field report prioritizing and to the broader research-evaluation literature’s recommendation that the two not be conflated13. Where an institution’s evaluation criteria do require targeting higher-ranked journals, authors are better served by making that trade-off deliberately, weighing the career benefit of a higher-ranked placement against the loss of reach and relevance incurred by publishing outside the field’s core specialist audience, rather than allowing institutional pressure to override scope fit without that trade-off being examined1.

The wider movement against journal-level metrics as proxies for quality

The tension documented by the health professions education survey, between an author’s own judgment of fit and an institution’s ranking-driven expectations, forms part of a much larger, well-documented debate about the overuse of journal-level metrics in research evaluation. The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), now endorsed by thousands of institutions and individuals worldwide, explicitly calls for eliminating the use of journal-based metrics such as impact factor as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles or individual researchers, on the grounds that a journal’s aggregate citation performance indicates little about the contribution of any single article5. Rice and colleagues’ cross-sectional analysis of promotion and tenure criteria at a large international sample of universities found that a majority of the institutions studied explicitly mentioned journal impact factor in their stated criteria, contrary to DORA’s recommendations; this helps to explain why survey respondents in fields such as health professions education report institutional pressure towards ranking even when they judge audience fit to be more important6. Haven and colleagues’ survey of perceived publication pressure found that pressure associated with journal-based metrics and productivity expectations was reported across disciplinary fields and academic ranks, rather than being confined to any one field, and was associated with researchers’ own reports of making compromises in their research or publication choices7. Casadevall and Fang’s commentary on the persistence of what they term “impact factor mania” argues that, despite more than a decade of methodological critique and formal declarations such as DORA, journal-level metrics remain deeply embedded in hiring, promotion and funding decisions because they are simple, readily available numbers that evaluators can apply without reading the underlying work; individual researchers, including those surveyed in health professions education, have limited power to change this structural incentive on their own8. Nicholas and colleagues’ survey-based study of researcher attitudes towards peer review found that, despite years of critique, including that represented by the Siler, Lee and Bero study and the broader DORA movement, researchers across disciplines continued to report that a journal’s reputation and the rigour of its review process were central to their decisions on where to submit. This finding is in some tension with the formal effort to de-emphasize journal-level metrics, since reputation is itself heavily shaped by the same citation and ranking signals that DORA argues should not be used in this way10. For authors in health professions education, this broader context is useful background rather than a reason to set aside the field-specific finding: audience and scope fit were reported as more influential than impact factor in the field’s own survey, even though the field’s authors, like researchers generally, operate within an evaluation system that has been slow to implement DORA’s recommendations in practice15. Moher and colleagues’ broader proposal for assessing scientists for hiring, promotion and tenure argues that the most durable remedy is structural rather than individual: institutions need to replace journal-metric-based criteria in their written promotion and tenure policies with criteria that assess the content and contribution of a researcher’s work directly, since asking individual authors to disregard institutional incentives while those incentives remain unchanged in writing places the burden of reform on those least able to change the system9. Rowley and colleagues’ broader, cross-disciplinary survey of journal-selection factors, discussed in more general terms elsewhere in the Academy’s library, found a closely related ranking of priorities (journal reputation, scope fit and reliability of the review process), suggesting that the pattern documented for health professions education authors is not an isolated result confined to one field but a field-level confirmation of a priority ordering that appears to hold fairly broadly across disciplines, even though the institutional pressures superimposed on it vary4.

Key points

Practical application

Frequently asked questions

@misc{/la_journal_choice_health_professions_education_authors_2026,
  author       = {{Pubrica Academy}},
  title        = {Factors Driving Journal Choice Among Health Professions Education Authors},
  howpublished = {Pubrica},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = {oct},
  url          = {https://pubrica.com/academy/journal-selection/important-factors-affecting-journal-selection-decisions-by-researchers/},
  note         = {Accessed: <span data-cite-acc="iso">2026-10-15</span>}
}

[ ] Identified which journals' core readership is most likely to use this specific finding
[ ] Checked the journal's stated scope against your manuscript's focus (practice, research methods, curriculum design, assessment)
[ ] Noted your institution's or funder's ranking-based expectations as a separate line item
[ ] Weighed the trade-off explicitly if ranking pressure and audience fit point to different journals
[ ] Checked for field-specific indexing (e.g., ERIC, in addition to PubMed/Scopus) relevant to education audiences