When choosing to which journal, conference, or publisher you submit your work, there are a number of factors to take into consideration.

Most likely, you will discuss options extensively with your supervisors and colleagues to get their input, but here are a few aspects that researchers often consider when choosing what would be desirable outlets for their work:

Publication/publisher requirements
Community and audience
Publication impact
Rights
Your identity

Publication/publisher requirements

Aim and scope
Does the aim and scope of the journal/conference/publisher fit, so that your work is likely to be considered for publication?
Length
Is the maximum (or minimum) length of the work as accepted by the journal/conference/publisher suitable for what you want to communicate?

Community and audience

Table of contents
Is this a journal/conference/publisher that you read and cite work from?
Inside info
Have your colleagues/peers submitted to the journal and if so, did they have a good experience of the editorial and peer review process?
Audience
What audience do you want to reach with your publication? For example, is the journal respected and read among the researchers in your field? Or are you aiming to reach an audience outside your own field, either academic or professional? Will the conference attract participants you want in your network and who may be able to provide good feedback on your work? Does the book publisher have a good series editor, reach the audience you are interested in, and have a good reputation? Does an anthology provide a good context for your work?
Language
What language will help you reach the audience you want? If you want to reach professionals and policy makers in Sweden, or if your topic is primarily of Swedish relevance, Swedish may be the best language. The same goes for studies made in another country. However, if you want to reach an international (academic) audience, you should publish in English. Publishing in English will also increase the likelihood that the publication will be indexed in databases that can provide visibility for your work (see below).
Co-author
Writing with co-authors increases the chances for the work's visibility. This is especially the case if you co-author with authors from other institutions and/or with another or wider network, as researchers will be likely to read and cite works by people they are familiar with.
Unfamiliar publications
If the journal/conference/publisher is not one that is well-known in your field, that you read work from, and/or that people you know (of) publish in, you should investigate it thoroughly. Is it an established and respected publisher, are people associated with the publication (such as editors or members of the editorial board) established researchers, and is the publication indexed in key databases? Journals/conferences/publishers who send you invitations to submit your work to them should be carefully investigated, if you do not know of it already or know the person sending the invitation. See more in the section on Misuse of open access publishing.

Publication impact

Indexed
Is the publication indexed in the major databases, so that your work is likely to show up in searches?
Impact factor
If you are publishing in a journal, is it listed in the Web of Science and/or Scopus databases and if so, what is its impact factor? Is the journal or publisher listed in the The Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers? Is it included in lists that are of importance in your own discipline (e.g. The Academic Journal Guide/AJG in Business and Economics)? This may be considered when your research is evaluated. If you are unsure of what all this means, read more in the section on Bibliometrics.
Competition
Journals with very high impact factors (see the page on Bibliometric indicators [under construction]) or very prestigious conferences often receive a large number of submissions and have a high rejection rate. Make an assessment of how likely your article/paper is to be accepted, for example based on the size and quality of the study's dataset, the novelty of the ideas/results, expected impact on future research or societal developments, and on how broadly interesting the research is. Remeber that more specialized journals/conferences may be monitored or attended by the top researchers in the field even if the scope is narrower than in a journal/conference with a higher impact (e.g. journal impact factor). You will also need to take into consideration how pressed you are for time – is it important that your paper is published fairly quickly or do you have time to submit to a journal/conference where you can expect to get rejected? Remember that it is rarely good if a journal is too quick in making their decisions.
Register the publication
You are required to register your publication in GUP (Gothenburg University Publications, see also Sources of publication and citation measurements [under construction]), preferably with a fulltext version of the paper in the institutional repository GUPEA (see more on the page Parallel publishing).

Rights

Copyright
What rights does the publisher’s copyright agreement allow you to retain? Can you publish the article as part of your dissertation? Can you publish the work open access? This will have consequences both for what you can do with the publication and how visible you can make it. See more in the sections on Copyright and Open access.

Your identity

Name and affiliation
You should strive to use a consistent form of your name and affiliation (your department and the University of Gothenburg) when you submit and consequently publish a work. This is important because it makes it easier to identify you as the author across several publications and because it may be of relevance for research evaluation nationally and at the university (see Research evaluation.
Persistent IDs
It is not unlikely that you are not the only researcher with your name, and it is quite probable that you will be moving between universities/employers during your research career. With this in mind, systems have been developed to create persistent researcher IDs, to make it possible to uniquely identify a person (a type of 'personnummer'). One such system for persistent IDs is ORCID, which is not linked to any particular publisher (some of the publishers have their own ID systems, but will also work with ORCID).

Further reading

PhD on Track (n.a.). Where to publish. https://www.phdontrack.net/share-and-publish/where-to-publish/

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