Journals for Paleontological Research

It is not always easy to decide in which journal to publish your research results. Information is usually scattered on the web. I therefore created this list to make this a little bit easier. Only peer-reviewed journals are listed. They are ordered by their impact factors and CiteScore Index on popular demand, but beware of the problems with these metrics. Note, that these factors have been rounded here and can be found in more details on Web of Science, Scimago and Google Scholar Metrics websites. Furthermore, the use of such metrics to evaluate scientific research is problematic for several reasons (e.g., Seglen 1997, Editors of PloS Medicine 2006; Metzke et al. 2010; Björn Brembs 2011; Lozano et al. 2012; Johnston 2013 ; Lariviere et al. 2016; Callaway 2016), including the fact that one „rates“ the place where it is published and not the scientific research itself. You can order the journals on any of the other categories (e.g., open access, main subject, …) yourself by clicking on the arrow of the sort button below it.

In the list journals are grouped into open and restricted journals Journals are here considered only as open access here, when all articles are freely available (excluding journals which allow open access for some articles with special fees, subscriptions or embargos on access). We also added which journals allow posting pre-prints and post-prints (category 1 – green), only post-prints (category 2 – blue), only pre-prints (category 3 – yellow) and no archiving (category 4 – white) as well as those which remain ungraded in Sherpa/Romeo (category 5 – ungraded). Note, that some journals do not allow any archiving of preprints or postprints (so-called white journals in this database).

The table also lists if a publication fee applies to publish an article (as listed on DOAJ): some open access journals have high publication fees. Note, that journals with very irregular publishing and/or which are considered predatory are not listed here. Some multidisciplinary science journals, which occasionally future paleontological articles, are listed for comparison. If you are aware of other journals to list here (or journals which have ceased to exist) or have additional comments/suggestions, please let me know! I am currently an academic editor for the open-access journal PeerJ, which also publishes paleontological research. Data derives from Web of Science, Elsevier (CiteScore based on Scopus data) and Google Scholar.

Potential errors are unintentional.