| 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
- 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).
- 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.
- Score each candidate on Fit × acceptance-odds × turnaround × cost/policy ×
audience, reading the live facts from each candidate's
resources/official-source-map.md.
- 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.
