Investigating the influence of factors affecting the choice of medical journals submission intention: A study on Chinese authors

The outflow of manuscripts has led to a decline in the quality of local Chinese journals, and the emergence of international publishers has led to the increasingly serious problem of article outflow from Chinese authors. This article is to investigate the journal submission intention from Chinese authors’ perspectives in the ‘Medicine, General & Internal’ category classified by the Web of Science database, which can help Chinese journals develop competitive marketing strategies to attract high-quality domestic research papers to be published in Chinese journals, thus improving the international influence of Chinese journals. This article selected the four most possible influencing determinants of medical journal submission intention based on the literature as independent variables, namely subjective norm, perceived corporate social responsibility, perceived engagement and perceived speed. Meanwhile, this article also examined gender as the moderator in finding the strengths and weaknesses in the relationship. The data collected from 327 have been analysed using IBM SPSS and SmartPLS software. We found that three selected independent variables (i.e. subjective norm, perceived engagement and perceived speed) are significant predictors of submission intention to the journal. Meanwhile, gender was found to moderate the relationship between subjective norm and perceived engagement and submission intention, making use of the product indicator approach, but it cannot regulate the relationship between perceived speed and submission intention.