Conferences in Bioethics:
Some of the major bioethics conferences are held annually by the Canadian Bioethics Society (CBS) and the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH), and biannually by the International Association for Bioethics (IAB) and the International Network on Feminist Approaches to Bioethics (FAB) (these last two are held in conjunction). Check out their websites for themes and submission due dates.
Conference Funding:
Some awards are available to McGill graduate students interested in presenting their work at conferences. More information can be found here. Note that many of these have specific eligibility criteria and restrictions.
Each department has its own resources for funding as well. Check out your department website or ask your contacts there whether there might be an opportunity available to help fund your conference registration, travel, accommodation, etc.
Bioethics Journals:
Lists of dedicated bioethics journals can be found in these examples: Bioethics Research Libary, Swedish Research Council, and in this list. Here is another list organized according to impact factor, a (controversial) rating that measures how frequently papers from that journal are cited.
That said, bioethics is inherently interdisciplinary, so many bioethics articles are published in medical journals that are either general (e.g. JAMA, Nature, Lancet, American Journal of Public Health) or specialist (e.g. Neurology, Journal of the National Cancer Institute, or Vaccine) or in journals based in different disciplines (e.g. Social Science and Medicine, Biosocieties, Sociology of Health and Illness, Medical Anthropology, Social Studies of Science).
In general, if you’re thinking of submitting a paper for publication, take a look at where the papers you are citing were published to get a sense of where the conversation you’re contributing to is taking place. Then have a look at the websites of the journals you’re considering and ask: Have papers been published here that consider topics similar to mine? Are papers published here that use a similar methodology to mine? And always feel free to ask your supervisor or any faculty in the Biomedical Ethics Unit for advice.
Be careful of predatory journals, which solicit submissions and then charge significant fees for publication in an unknown journal – more info can be found here.
