Picking a (target) publication venue (especially for recent masters students)

 There are a few things to consider:

  • Generally, but not always, the better a place is (higher impact, more respected) the harder it is to get in. Especially if you are coming out of a masters degree any publication can be a great addition to your CV. And also, any publication makes your work more visible; most likely it will be disseminated mostly through social media anyway. So while for a PhD student I'd usually say "start at your top aspiration, and if that fails work your way down," that's less true for someone doing this basically as a hobby / public good for humanity.
    • If you are trying to impact policy, it can also be important to get it out quickly, which again is often but not always going to be easier for well easier publications, e.g. newsletters, archives, blogs, conference proceedings.
    • Note that you can start with something fast and easy and then work your way up. It's quite normal now to archive early drafts, if you can get them accepted to the archive.
  • Don't try to publish to a venue of "fools" who aren't appreciating the importance of work in another area, that you'd like to draw to their attention. Rather, publish where other stuff from your area is published. Even within conferences, this is true about choosing keywords – choose keywords used by the others who publish work most like yours (it took me a few years of my PhD to figure this out.) Maybe one day you'll get a chance to draw your work to the attention of other fields, but get published first.
  • It's a good idea to start out by looking at your own bibliography: whatever venue you cite from most is likely to be the best one for you to target, unless what you did is really of a different scale or calibre.
  • Wherever you are thinking of publishing, be sure to flip through a few recent issues / proceedings to make sure your work could fit in, and then do a proper search and make sure you've read related works from that venue, and (of course!) cited them.

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