How to search for a suitable journal to publish my paper?

Question

I'm an undergraduate math major, recently I've written a paper about approximation by neural networks in a theoretical settings because I really like the mathematics involved in neural networks. It is a paper mainly based on another paper, for your information, 'Optimal Approximation with Sparsely Connected Deep Neural Networks' by Bölcskei et al.

What I've done is not something innovative at all. I proved two results from the original paper because the author only gave a hint on how to prove the theorems, and I thought it will be a good idea to explore more. As a result, I found some other research papers which helped me to gave the two proofs in great detail.

Now my paper is nearly complete, I just have to choose which journal to submit my paper, then do a little adjustment based on their requirements, it will then be done. However, I'm not confident enough to publish my paper to, for example, the SIAM Journal or the IEEE Journal, because they would expect research works with more originality and innovation. How do I find and evaluate suitable journals for my type of research paper?

Answer 1

When one isn't certain about where to publish something, often the first place should to go is people you know. In the case of an undergrad, you should have professors/mentors are your school who can help out. Another option is to ask the authors of the original paper who may have more of an idea. In this case, given the circumstances, an undergraduate focused journal may be ideal. There also may not be a good place to formally publish it at all. Sometimes people don't give almost any details of a proof, and you have to work it out on your own; that's not publishable in general (even if it should be). However, at a minimum, you can certainly put it up on the arXiv as an expository work there, which doesn't count for "publication" for most purposes but will still look good for things like applying to grad school.