About Journal Hunt

Last updated 11 September 2026

Journal Hunt is a UK-based platform that helps students, researchers and academics find the right journal for their manuscript.

Why it exists

Choosing where to submit is one of the least supported decisions in academic life. Most large publishers offer a tool that searches their own titles, so finding a good fit means repeating the same search across eight separate sites and hoping none of them missed something. Early-career researchers, who have the least guidance and the most at stake, feel this hardest.

Journal Hunt searches across publishers rather than within one, so a single search covers journals from Elsevier, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Wiley, SAGE, university presses, learned societies and independent open-access publishers alike.

How it works

Paste your abstract and the engine compares it against what each journal has actually published recently — not just the aims and scope page a publisher wrote years ago. Matching is on meaning as well as keywords, so a paper on supervisory feedback finds journals publishing in that area even where no single word matches.

The catalogue holds 36,148 journals, built from OpenAlex and the Directory of Open Access Journals. A journal appears if it is listed in OpenAlex’s curated set or in DOAJ — curation done by established open scholarly infrastructure, not by us.

What we do not do

• We do not rank by impact factor. No journal metrics are displayed and no citation counts enter the ranking.
• We do not decide for you whether obscurity matters. Established journals are favoured by default, because that is what most authors expect. But it is a switch on the search form, not a judgement baked into the results — turn “Favour established journals” off and ranking is purely on fit, which brings forward newer, smaller and regional journals that would otherwise sit below better-known ones.
• We weight for language. A journal that does not accept manuscripts in the language you are writing in cannot publish your work, however well the topic matches, so it ranks lower.
• We do not label anyone predatory. We show where a journal is indexed and let you draw your own conclusions. Inclusion is not endorsement, and absence is not an accusation.
• We do not keep your abstract. It is used to run your search and is never written to our database. See the privacy notice.

Get in touch

Suggestions, corrections and complaints are all welcome, particularly if a search returned something odd — that is the fastest way to make it better. Email info@journalhunt.org, or privacy@journalhunt.org for anything about your data.