Columbia College Chicago has put together a database of literary journal information. It gives you a snapshot of the type of fiction/poetry published in each journal, with currently more than fifty journals listed. While Duotrope‘s best information is statistic based — how many submissions a journal receives and how quickly they reject/accept — and the reviews of Newpages focuses on the overall journal performance, these reviews go story by story, classifying according to genre, length, POV, and rating how difficult it would be for an emerging writer to break in.
One terribly annoying factor is that every single Market Sheet (one page of information about the journal) is a PDF file, which ends up cluttering up your computer with files and doesn’t allow for easy switching between reports. Also, some of the reports aren’t as helpful as they could be, offering the POV (another omniscient third person narrator) yet not making clear whether the story is magical realism or straight realism. But if you can’t read every journal that you submit to — although you should, of course, at least once — this might help you determine whether to send that story to Black Clock or Quarterly West.
