rt-journal-match

name	rt-journal-match
description	Use when an author asks "which journal should I send this to?" or needs the best resubmission target after a reject. Profiles the paper, shortlists candidates from an index of 743 venues, and ranks them into reach / match / safe with a resubmission ladder. Reads live venue facts from each pack's source-map; defers fit judgment to the venue's own topic-selection skill.

Journal-Match (rt-journal-match)

The missing front-door question — which venue? — across the whole repository. Full methodology + the stable venue index live in shared-resources/journal-selection/journal-match.md and venue-index.tsv.

When to trigger

• The author has a result/draft and no settled target.
• A paper was rejected and needs the best next venue.
• A "not a fit" signal means the scope/venue needs rethinking.

What it does

1. Profile the paper — discipline + subfield, method/design, contribution type, setting/data/region, ambition (be honest). This step carries real weight: restricting candidates to the right discipline lifts retrieval of the true venue by ~15 points (see eval/RESULTS.md).
2. Shortlist from venue-index.tsv by discipline / lane / region / venue_type, then narrow on scope_keywords against the paper's abstract. Every venue is in the index — depth packs point at a source_map, breadth-bundle venues at a profile_path.
3. Score each candidate on Fit × acceptance-odds × turnaround × cost/policy × audience, reading the live facts from each candidate's resources/official-source-map.md.
4. Return reach / match / safe (≈2–3 each) with one-line rationales + the live facts, then a submit order and resubmission ladder — seed the ladder from ladder.tsv (candidate adjacency, not a ranking) and apply your own fit/odds judgement to it.

Hard rules

• Live facts from the source-map, never from memory (fees, acceptance, turnaround, page limits, data policy).
• Fit judgment defers to the venue's *-topic-selection / *-contribution-framing.
• Be honest about odds; don't inflate a paper into a reach it can't clear.
• Coverage honesty: if a plausible venue is outside the index and its bundle, say so.

Output format

【Paper profile】discipline / method / contribution / setting / ambition
【Reach】V — why; key live facts (desk-reject, turnaround, fee)
【Match】V — …
【Safe】V — …
【Submit order & ladder】V_top → if reject → V_next (what to change) → …
【Open questions】facts to re-verify in the source-map before submitting

Anti-patterns

• Recommending only reaches (wastes the timeline) or only safes (undersells the paper).
• Ignoring lane — sending a qualitative/theory paper to an empirical-only venue.
• Treating the tier column as a precise ranking (it is an indicative bucket).

Next: once a target is chosen, rt-execution-bridge to run the analysis and rt-submission-readiness to check the bar.