New web services that help authors choose journals

The motivations for an author to choose a journal to submit to are complex and include factors relating to impact and prestige, service quality, and publication costs and policies. Authors require information about multiple characteristics of journals that may be difficult to obtain. This article compares and contrasts the new author-oriented journal comparison tools and services that have emerged to assist researchers in this important step of the scholarly publishing process. Many of these tools combine factors to provide full web-based manuscript submission decision tools, however all have limitations that reduce their usefulness.