The decision about where to submit is usually made quickly, late, and on the basis of impact factor. It deserves better, because fit is the single most common reason a paper is returned without review, and a mis-aimed submission costs you months with nothing to show for them.
A scope statement is not the scope
Every journal publishes a description of what it covers. These are written to be inclusive, they are revised rarely, and they describe the journal’s self-image rather than its recent behaviour. Reading one will tell you whether your paper is plausibly in range. It will not tell you whether the journal would publish it.
What tells you that is the last year or two of what the journal has actually published. Not the landmark papers everyone cites, which are unrepresentative by definition, but the ordinary research articles. Read fifteen or twenty titles and abstracts in your area and ask three questions. What kind of claim do these papers make? At what scale of advance? And is there a paper here that mine would sit naturally beside?
If you cannot find a paper yours would sit beside, that is the answer, whatever the scope statement says.
What editors mean by fit
Fit is partly subject and mostly level. Journals differ less in what topics they will consider than in how large an advance they require, and that is the axis authors misjudge. A solid, careful, incremental paper is the right paper for a great many journals and the wrong paper for a few, and no amount of writing makes it the second thing.
There is also a readership question that is easy to miss. A journal with a broad readership needs a paper whose importance can be explained to someone outside the immediate subfield. A specialist journal does not, and a paper written for the broad audience can read as thin there. The same work genuinely wants different framing at the two, which is why resubmitting unchanged after a rejection so often fails.
Presubmission enquiries
A presubmission enquiry is a short email to the editorial office asking whether a manuscript would be considered. Not every journal takes them, and those that do say so.
They are worth sending when you genuinely cannot tell whether a paper is in range, and particularly when the paper is unusual in form: a negative result, a methods advance, something that crosses two fields. They are not worth sending to ask whether a paper is good enough, because that is not a question an editor can answer from a summary.
Keep it to a paragraph or two. State the claim, state what was known before, state what you did, and attach the abstract. The reply will usually be brief and sometimes discouraging, and either way you have bought a decision in days rather than months. A discouraging reply is a good outcome.
Impact factor, and what to use instead
Impact factor is a property of a journal’s citation distribution, which is heavily skewed, so it describes the journal’s most-cited papers rather than a typical one. It is also field-dependent to a degree that makes cross-field comparison close to meaningless.
That does not make it useless, because it correlates with selectivity and selectivity is real information. But it is a poor primary criterion. The things worth weighing alongside it are who reads the journal, whether the people you want to reach cite it, how long it takes, whether it is indexed where your field looks, and what it will cost you to publish there.
On that last point: be clear with yourself about article processing charges before you submit, not after acceptance. They vary by more than an order of magnitude, and discovering the number at the point of acceptance is a bad position to negotiate from.
Predatory journals, and how to tell
The low end of this market is populated by journals that will publish anything for a fee, and they have become good at looking legitimate. The cost of publishing in one is not only the money. It is a paper on your record that colleagues will read as a signal about your judgement.
The signals that actually discriminate are not the obvious ones.
Solicitation is the strongest. Legitimate journals do not email individual researchers flattering them and inviting a submission on any topic with a fast turnaround. Look at the editorial board and check two or three members independently: are they real, are they in the right field, and do they know they are on it. Look at a recent issue and read a paper properly. Check whether the journal is indexed in the databases your field uses, rather than trusting a list of impressive-sounding metrics on its own site. Look for a named publisher with an address. And treat a guaranteed review time, or any promise about the outcome, as disqualifying on its own.
The Directory of Open Access Journals and the Committee on Publication Ethics membership lists are both useful external checks, and your institution’s librarians do this for a living and are generally delighted to be asked.
A practical sequence
Shortlist three journals rather than one, in order, before you write the final draft. Write the paper for the first one, in its register and at its level. Know in advance what your second choice is and what would have to change, because the day a rejection arrives is the worst possible day to make that decision.
Then, if the first journal declines without review, you lose weeks rather than months, because you already know where it goes next and why.