The John Smiths and Mary Browns of the academic realm used to have a devil of a time distinguishing their work from their namesakes. However, recent developments in author identification have yielded several initiatives to:
Get your own author IDs established now!
Choosing a journal in which to publish is not always intuitive. There may be obvious choices specific to your chosen thesis subject, but there are also less-specific titles which you might also consider. Publishers weigh other factors too as they decide which manuscripts to accept. Thomson Reuters, producer of the Web of Science database offers a tool, Manuscript Matcher, to assist you with making this choice. Accessed through the Web of Science database, EndNote is primarily a citation manager. It is within EndNote that you will find Manuscript Matcher. You will first need to create a free EndNote account.
The video below provides a brief overview of the simplicity of using Manuscript Matcher
You may seek to choose to publish your article as Open Access, meaning it will be freely available for anyone to read. There are several types of Open Access:
Gold Open Access in an entirely Open Access journal (like PLoS One)
The author pays the publisher to publish the article as Gold Open Access so that it will be freely available for all to read, by virtue of being published in an Open Access Journal.
Gold Open Access in a subscription journal which permits individual Open Access articles
The author pays the publisher to publish the article as Gold Open Access so that it will be freely available for all to read, regardless of the reader having subscription access to the journal or not. Some other articles in the same issue may not be free to read.
Green Open Access, AKA Self Archiving
The publisher publishes the article in a subscription journal at no cost to the author. The reader must have a subscription or purchase the article in order to read it. However, dependent upon the publishing agreement, the author may publish the Accepted Manuscript on a personal website, institutional repository, or pre-print service. The Accepted Manuscript is the final version accepted by the publisher after peer review, but before the publisher has formatted the article to the journal publishing style. The publishing agreement may include an embargo period before Green Open Access self archiving is permitted.
Some biology/marine biology pre-print services include: