How to Submit Journal Articles?
How to Submit Journal and Published Articles
I am a post-doctoral researcher who helps run research groups. Every week we spend half an hour meeting our groups to discuss important topics for young academics. Last fall I wanted to give an article on how to submit journal articles - a format that is intrinsically connected to professional success and the pleasure of being an academic. I have read many books about writing for academics, such as Author Howard Becker for Social Scientists, Thinking Like Your Editor, and How to Write Many (just to name a few). However, no one directly discussed how to avoid the trap of submitting journal articles for publication. So I wrote one for my students, which turned into a story in front of you.
Here I will guide you how to submit journal articles. This process involves selecting journals, preparing submissions, evaluating reviews, revising papers (crossing), and publishing articles after they appear. This guide is biased towards communication - my discipline - but it will apply to others as well.
Excitement of Journal Articles
Academics rarely write just for the sake of writing. The notion of "mind life" is a comfortable metaphor that rarely reflects reality. We usually write for specific purposes. Maybe we want to write opinion editorial works for newspapers, monograph books, or journal articles. Each of these formats and audiences requires different considerations. For op-ed work you must connect your work with a public audience in an accessible way. A book may be revealed for several years and requires writing a book proposal, a very specific genre of writing. But nothing captivates most academics than journal articles.
There are several reasons why journal articles are the most important writing genres in the academic world. In most disciplines, success is tracked through journal articles. A friend recently told me about how his department evaluates his work for a term. The chair collects a spreadsheet of each article and the impact factors of each journal - figures that illustrate how influential the journal is. Total dictates the possibility of accepting a term of office and as such, remains in his job. This stressful example shows how in an academic career journal article determines success or failure. But writing journal articles can and should also be fun!
For many academics, journal articles are an interesting format for their scholarships. They let them work on challenging questions and have public conversations with peers. Writing journal articles also helps us explore new disciplinary topics and fields. I am an interdisciplinary scholar and regularly publishes in journals outside my own discipline, communication. Academics are rarely satisfied with what they did last year. There are always other ideas round the corner! To be honest, it's rather addictive to do research. This is an interesting, and sometimes frustrating, part of academic life.
Although I cannot predict the chances of your article, I can tell you that the manuscript will not be accepted if you do not submit it! It starts by choosing a journal.
Select Journal
The first step is to determine which journal is best for publication. The journal you choose determines how you write the article. For example, many journals exclusively accept empirical articles and need a methodology that is clearly described, while others adhere to a critical and cultural approach in which a methodology is not strictly enforced. Other journals allow more experimental formats. The Science, Technology & Society involved accepts delivery formats such as review essays, critical involvement, and "footprints," in addition to standard research articles. This will save you time if you decide on a journal before you even start writing!
If you are new to your discipline, you may not know which journal is the most important. It is difficult to trace, because there are always new journals that appear and old ones disappear if there is not enough interest. How did you find out about high-quality journals? All kinds of places! You might hear about them from your fellow students or professors. Maybe you saw a journal appear in Google's undergraduate search for your research topic. Once you start finding journals, monitor them. An easy way to achieve this is by maintaining a spreadsheet. Mine is a simple Google spreadsheet with columns for titles, categories (e.g. Communication, political science, STS), impact factors, ratings, open access (yes / no), and comments.
How should you evaluate the journal? There are no easy answers because there are many factors. Impact and ranking factors are the most obvious. The impact factor is statistical: the frequency with which each article in the journal has been cited annually. Ranking is more a rough guide than numbers that determine how important journals are to your discipline. Interdisciplinary journals often receive ratings for various disciplines. For example, American Behavioral Scientists have developed from their origins in psychology. As a result, it is currently ranked 76/121 in clinical psychology, and 30/96 in interdisciplinary social science. While these and other statistics have been criticized, as my friend's tenure review example shows, they remain the way the institution evaluates the potential for promotion.
You might be interested in another aspect of the journal that escapes statistics. things that fit the theme; A good sign that you are publishing in the right journal is that you are quoting a published journal! Maybe the review board has members that you suspect will be sympathetic to the journal you are writing, or there are special problems in this journal that will be very suitable. Some academics prioritize the issuance of open access. Being open access means that, at the very least, people can access articles for free - although that also often means that they don't charge for publishing. Science is built to be able to utilize and criticize the work of others.
But beware, some unscrupulous journals touting their "open access" status while deceiving statistics so that they appear to have a high reputation, only to extract exorbitant fees from the author. Librarian Jeffrey Beall keeps a list of "predatory" open access journals. If you stay in the academic world long enough, you will start receiving daily doses of spam emails from these unscrupulous publishers and can recognize them. If you are not sure, check the Beall list and evaluate their editorial board - do you see anyone you know and respect? When in doubt, ask a trusted professor!
All of these factors - impact, relevance, and open access - must be part of your decision to publish in a journal. Then there are pragmatic factors, such as how fast you want your article to come out. When I was just starting out at the academy, my friend Danah Boyd stressed the importance of publishing in journals that have a quick turnaround time. Websites like Journal Reviewer allow you to understand how quickly you can expect your paper through peer review. If you see a timely topic - such as the dissemination of misinformation in the 2016 presidential election - you might want to get your work done quickly. To this day, danah blog about work in progress. He also made his work papers and lecture transcripts publicly available at no charge. This cuts across journal barriers which can often prohibit the spread of scholarships outside academics. Early publishing and often became part of his recipe for success as a leading public intellectual, making him the director and founder of the Data & Society research institute.
Prepare and Submit Paper
After you find the appropriate journal, start writing articles using their formatting requirements. Reformatting articles for different journals can easily waste your free time! You will find journal publishing requirements on their website under links with titles such as "information for authors" or "submission guidelines." There you will find information such as the number of articles and the style you like. Journals accept articles written in a particular style such as APA or Harvard. Some even insist on slight variations on established styles.
Tracking references will be able to hinder your writing. One way to track references is to use the right writing tools. Quote management software such as Zotero and Endnote are very important for maintaining your sanity. They also allow you to use formatting templates to automatically generate citations in the text and reference sections. This will produce results if you send to a different journal later because you don't need to hand format references!