I work in a university (where like most I know of) there is significant pressure to publish. I have a target (well more than a target - there is a "naughty list" which I am on and which those of us had meetings in March when it was made clear that if we fail to meet our targets it would be the door) to submit an article to a journal by end June. I also have a target to write c10,000 words of part-time PhD (prob lit review) by end Dec (I registered in Dec 09). I have several options as far as the publication is concerned - I can write something related to my PhD for a fairly low level journal which my head of department is on the editorial board of (and which will undoubtedly get accepted), I can write a proper article for a serious peer reviewed journal, again related to PhD, or I can (and this has only just become a possibility this week) write up some research I have been doing over the past three years - the first year was written up as conference proceedings and I now have two more years of data - for a new serious journal which has a call for papers out, the editor of which has encouraged me to write up the research.

It seems that the pros and cons are:
Option 1 - it's fairly easy, it's related to PhD so work will not be wasted but it is a pretty low level journal with little credibility - do I want to put my first PhD related article in such a crummy place?
Option 2 - again related to PhD, I have a conference presentation I can start to write up but I don't think I can do it in a month (part-time esp as we have exam boards etc at the moment), no guarantee of acceptance (but does that matter - target is to submit not to get accepted)
Option 3 - fairly straightforward as I have a 5000 word conference proceedings paper as a basis, I can cite that in the references, the editor seemed really keen based on my abstract form the conference proceedings (" would certainly complete such challenging research and submit it for approval to our revisors. I believe it has potential!") (and people have told me that new journals are easier to get into) but the work will be stand alone - it is TOTALLY unrelated to PhD and so will not be contributing to the 10,000 word target (but is an area I am still interested in)

I just don't know what to do - I keep picking up one book / journal for one option then another and so on. At the moment I am edging towards Option 3 with the aim of completing Option 2 for submission in Jan (so that meets next year's target). Advice please.

If it was me I'd go for option 3. You still have many months after then to deal with the PhD stuff.

Hello, (In My View) your article will be Judged mainly by its content not by the Journal where it is published. You can try to raise the credibility of that journal with the high level input as well.

Agree that it is not just the journal which matters but the article BUT the journal is open access, online (and is edited out of Eastern Europe by a friend of my Head of Department and it seems anything that comes via him gets accepted with no real evidence of peer review) - I just feel a bit like its a cop out not trying for a real journal first. It was his suggestion as an easy way to meet the univerisity publication target without diverting too much fomr PhD (in fact he told me not to waste the conference presentation work (which includes a proposed model) on the "friendly" journal but to save it for a real one). And in reality we all set more stall by articles in the top journals in our field than in new obscure ones.

Jepson! I will recommend Publishing something in friendly journal too. Never mind if it is simply a scaled down/straightforward version of the main article.

At this point, I'd be tempted to go for option 3. That way you can tick off a publication in first year (with minimal hassle), and save all your phd work for future papers, maybe putting more of it together for a better journal. Even if the work is unrelated to your phd it's still valid evidence of your abilities, and I wouldn't pass up the chance for a publication if the timing's good.