There's also the problem that there are a lot of low-quality journals out there which exist to get paid to publish just about anything. To the OP, I agree with

There's also the problem that there are a lot of low-quality journals out there which exist to get paid to publish just about anything. To the OP, I agree with fjfaase - if you don't have references, your work won't meet the baseline scholarship 'real' journal expect. "Real" means read by others in the field you want to publish. If there's literally no previous work to build on, then that means you aren't in that field, or it's not a problem which interests the field. At the very least you can start "every previous publication has focused on X [cite several review articles]. In this work I consider Y." If you do have references, those give you an idea of where others in your field publish.