When deciding where to publish your work, you may wish to take the following considerations into account:

Publishing Timelines 

While many law journals accept submissions year-round, others have designated submission periods. According to Scholastica data on law reviews, the majority of articles are submitted between February-March and August-September.* For the most accurate information regarding submission timelines, consult individual journal websites.

*For further detail on the data, see Part 1, Part 2, & Part 3 

Scope and Submission Guidelines

In addition to consulting a journal's website for a call for papers, topical focus areas, and editorial guidelines, browsing recent issues of the journal may help you to determine whether your work would be a good fit. You may also wish to consider whether the journal accepts submissions via email, mail, ExpressO, and/or Scholastica.

Journal Quality

A variety of proxy measures of journal quality have been developed to assist researchers in deciding where to submit their work. However, there is no perfect mechanism for ranking scholarly publications. The Journal Rankings tab provides more detailed information about various journal lists and metrics.

Indexing

You may wish to check whether a specific journal is indexed in key resources such as HeinOnline, LexisNexis, Westlaw, LegalTrac, the Index to Legal Periodicals, and the Current Index to Legal Periodicals. 

Open Access

Another consideration is whether a journal makes content freely accessible online, which studies have found leads to a citation advantage over publishing in subscription-based journals. To determine whether a journal is open access, consult the copyright policies on the journal 's website, or try searching for the journal in the Directory of Open Access Journals and/or SHERPA/RoMEO, which aggregates copyright policies. Note that if a journal does not make content openly accessible, you may still be able to self archive a version of your work in the Washington University Libraries Law School Scholarship Repository as well as platforms such as SSRN.