How competitive are journals compared to top ai conferences? [D]

Hi everyone,

The NeurIPS results aren’t out yet, but I’m expecting my paper to be rejected, so I’m considering submitting it to a journal instead.

My scores were 2/3/3 (3/4/4). I feel like I would probably get a similar outcome if I submitted the paper to ICLR or CVPR, so at this point I’m leaning toward a journal rather than trying another top conference.

I’m obviously not aiming for top-tier journals like TPAMI, IJCV, or TMLR. I’m considering journals that are a step below those, and I was wondering how difficult the review process and acceptance bar are compared with top ai conferences like NeurIPS.

The journals I’m currently considering are:

1. Pattern Recognition
2. Neurocomputing
3. Knowledge-Based Systems
4. Neural Networks
5. Expert Systems with Applications

For those who have experience submitting to these journals, how would you compare their review standards and acceptance difficulty such as NeurIPS, CVPR, or ICLR?

I’d also appreciate any thoughts on which of these journals might be a reasonable target for a paper that received scores around this range at NeurIPS.

For context, the paper is about attention mechanisms for Vision Transformers, with the main contribution being a modification to the attention module.