How to Get Research Published in Journals

Abby Day

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351930130
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Guías de estudio
• Subtopic: Guías de estudio

Now in its second edition, this internationally best-selling book has been revised and updated. It focuses on helping people overcome some of the most common obstacles to successful publication. Lack of time? An unconscious fear of rejection? Conflicting priorities? In this, the first book to address the subject, Abby Day explains how to overcome these obstacles and create publishable papers for journals most likely to publish them. She shows how to identify a suitable journal and how to plan, prepare and compile a paper that will satisfy its requirements. She pays particular attention to the creative aspects of the process. As an experienced journal editor and publisher, Dr Day is well placed to reveal the inside workings of the reviewing procedure - and the more fully you understand this, the greater the chance that what you submit will be accepted and published. For academic and research staff, in whatever discipline, a careful study of Dr Day's book could be your first step on the road to publication.

I Setting Your Objectives

1 Introduction

Since the first edition of How to Get Research Published in Journals was published more than a decade ago, much and little has changed. Academics are reading and publishing research in academic journals for much the same reason as they have since 1665, when the first scientific journal in the English-speaking world, The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, was launched. We will look in more detail in the following two chapters at why academics do (and do not) want to publish.

In this chapter I want to review the current practice of journal publishing to highlight what has changed recently, what is likely to change, what will likely remain the same and why any of that may or may not matter to any academic wanting to get published in journals. There are three main issues driving change – and stability – in the publishing field: pressures to publish, places to publish and the profitability of publishing.

Pressures to Publish

One major change over the last 10 years has been an increased pressure from funders, government and universities to disseminate more widely. It has become increasingly apparent during the last 10 years that, one way or other, academics must publicize their research. Publicly and privately funded research comes with certain conditions, such as conducting the research ethically, completing it on time and within budget, and – most importantly – disseminating the results. Research councils, charities and the private sector all stipulate that their funding is linked to dissemination. Some individual funders, such as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, ring-fence a specific amount of money to pay for dissemination when a project ends. Research councils often tie end-of-award decisions to dissemination. Indeed, specifying how you will do that is one of the most important critical success factors in any funding application (see, for example, my related work ‘Winning Research Funding’, Day Peters 2003.)

Even research that is indirectly funded as part of an academic’s salary comes with the expectation to publish. Increasingly, an academic’s published works form part of a department’s publishing portfolio which can be submitted for future research funding. In the UK, for example, the Research Assessment Exercise judges publications every 5 years and awards points which influence the university’s share of government funding.

Public money is not, according to many researchers, distributed fairly amongst institutions. One-quarter of central government research income goes to just four universities – Oxford, Cambridge, University College, London and Imperial College, London. The system is unlikely to change, with those which have the highest research ratings getting more money, leading, some argue, to an inevitable structural elitism in education. This would potentially disadvantage newer universities with less research record and less infrastructure to support it. In the UK, the Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) which score best on the UK’s Research Assessment Exercise receive more funding than those who do not. Many people are critical of this approach, arguing that new universities or those without a record of accomplishment in research can never break through into the ‘elite’ arena. This puts more pressure on universities to increase their research profile, and a major strategy to achieve this is publishing.

Places to Publish

The pressure to publish is combined with an increasing choice of places to publish. In our more global, interactive, instant age, authors are able to choose more and varied routes to dissemination. Let’s review a few below:

Popular media

Radio, magazines, newspapers, television and newsletters all offer excellent opportunities for academics to publicize their research. Many funding bodies and universities require researchers to issue press releases and cooperate with in-house public relations experts.

Reports

Most funders expect the Principal Investigator to write a publicly available, final report summarizing the project’s key findings. These are usually published in the funder’s own newsletters or websites. It may also be appropriate to produce reports for government or other bodies if there are policy issues to be considered.

Web 2.0

What is sometimes described as the second version of the web, Web 2.0, conceives of the web as driven by users, not major organizations. We see people communicating in chat rooms, on blogs, in discussion groups on each other’s home pages and via collective arena. Here, discussion is largely unmediated, unedited and seen to be free from more overt forms of commercial or political controls. The results can influence the more traditional, established media such as newspapers and television which increasingly incorporate reports and opinions from web users.

Conferences and seminars

Academic conferences and seminars are ideal venues to disseminate research and to network with other researchers, sometimes forging lasting collaborative relationships. Some conferences will publish presentations on their websites and in their newsletters, or issue post-conference journals or edited collections based on the papers. Many researchers use conferences as the first site for presenting their research and then amending their papers for potential journal publication. Seminars, usually smaller and more focused events, provide ideal opportunities to discuss people’s research in detail.

Books

Many academics want to publish a book, either as a result of their PhD or other major research project. This can be an excellent way to publicize a large project and can give a satisfying feeling of ‘closure’ to a lengthy piece of research. Before rushing to write your book, remember that all publishers require detailed proposals: you can visit their websites and look at their templates and helpful suggestions. If they accept your proposal they will then send it for review to judge from external assessment whether or not there is a market for your proposed book.

Apart from a book you’ve written, you might also consider contributing a chapter to someone else’s book. This usually happens because someone approaches you and invites you to do so. In that event you must bear in mind that the editor will expect your chapter to fit into the collection as a whole and you may therefore have to adapt your work considerably.

Book publishing does have several disadvantages. It is time-consuming, with little financial compensation unless you’ve written a best-selling textbook. It will also not reach a large audience, given that academic books sells in hundred and low thousands at best, and its content will not be digitized and made freely available through the Internet. Academic books are often not reprinted once they sell out, and therefore your book may disappear forever.

More worryingly for many academics, books are not subject to the same rigorous review process as journal papers. Writing in the Times Higher Education Supplement (5 January 2007) Dr David Voas, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, said that it would be better for scholars in sociology and the humanities to write fewer books as: ‘Articles in good journals are easily accessible electronically; books may be dear to buy, difficult to borrow and deadly to read. But books have been fetishized by promotion panels, despite being subject to softer peer review, so academics feel compelled to crank them out.’ He continued that while journal articles are sometimes criticized for being narrow and inconsequential: ‘too many books are all those things at ten times the length.’

In summary, there are many routes to dissemination. How do academics choose which medium to use? It depends on the audience with whom you want to communicate. Most large-scale research projects will target a mix of media from newsletters, books and journals to radio, the web and television, Whatever the mix you choose, it is likely that the most important publication for your academic career will be the academic journal. Unique amongst all media, even books and conference papers, a journal paper is systematically peer-reviewed. It therefore serves as the mark of quality and excellence in your field. That is why many academics place journal publishing at the top of their list.

And yet, the nature of what a journal actually is has changed substantially over the past 10 years or so. This change has been driven by both pressures described above – the pressure to publish and the places available – and a third pressure: the profitability of publishing.

Profitability of Publishing

In the mid 1990s, people were accessing research mainly through reading paper-based journals and occasionally by finding journal papers on the Internet. Today, the reverse is more likely: we read paper-based journals less and download the electronic version more.

It may be helpful here to summarize briefly the process from submission to publication. An author usually submits a paper to a journal via an electronic platform, such as Manuscript Central. They enter their personal information, submit an abstract, provide a title and keywords and attach their paper. The editor (or assistant) is notified by email that a paper has been submitted and the author receives an automatic email acknowledgement. If the editor concludes that the paper meets the editorial objectives of the journal (and much, much more about this later!), then the editor, often with an assistant, selects referees and sends the paper for review. Referees receive an email notifying them a paper is available for review. Referees download the paper, review it and send their comments through the system to the editor, who makes one of only three possible decisions: accept, revise or reject. The editor notifies the author.

If the paper is accepted outright – which rarely happens – then the author celebrates, signs forms regarding copyright and warranties, and awaits publication in several months time. In the case of ‘revise’, the author should also celebrate (but often sulks – and more about this later!) revises, resubmits the paper and sometimes revises again depending on the editor’s decision. The journal is then assembled according to its pagination budget and mix of papers, book reviews, research notes and so on, and signed off by the editor. Most publishers then send their journals to a printer who produces a paper-based version and mails the final copies to subscribers. Numbers are small, because most subscribers to academic journals are university libraries, not individuals. Many publishers today are seeking to reduce their print copies as libraries are clearing their shelves and relying on electronic copies.

There are also now, apart from paper-based traditional academic journals, peer-reviewed e-journals which have only ever existed in digital format and offer added benefits to authors not found in the traditional model. For example, e-journals can be timelier, shortening the interval between submission and publication. Because they are not constrained by space and cost factors, many allow longer papers than would be possible in paper journals – although some editors of electronic journals still maintain word limits in the interest of coherence. Publishing in an e-journal allows more interesting ways to present data in a flexible, electronic format, which may make it more attractive to authors using tables and graphs, and wanting to link to other Internet-based sources. One potential drawback of the e-journal is that its comparative novelty may not lend it the same prestige as an older, more established journal. In the publishing industry, it takes a long time to build a reputation, and even longer to destroy it.

Whether it appears in an e-journal or a paper-based, traditional journal, the journal content available on the Internet is digitally encrypted so that the content is accessible only to subscribers. This is when the perception of ‘the journal’ may begin to be obscured. Most people accessing a paper on the Internet find it through keyword searches, not by navigating through the journal’s home page and browsing through the most recent issue. The practice of keyword access may hide the paper’s source and, consequently, the means by which it was produced. What is not obvious to the researcher using search engines is that the source of the paper is most often a traditional journal, created initially through the traditional means of submission, peer review, revision, proof-reading and printing described above. While the content may then be read on a web page, its original place was likely in a paper journal alongside six or seven other papers, book reviews, research notes and an editorial. Recognizing the original source is important because it provides the context within which any academic paper is initially judged by the editorial team, much more about that later.

The drive towards electronic access has caused the issue of ownership to become hotly contested amongst publishers, government and academics. Journal publishing is expensive, but managed well can be highly profitable. The academic publishing industry is tough and precise. Strong publishers survive; others fail. Even non-commercial publishers, such as learned societies, want their journals to make money, often as a means of subsidizing other activities of the society. Over the last decade, many small publishers have been acquired by larger ones and the larger ones have acquired each other as the industry consolidates. How journal subscriptions are sold and bought also reflects this consolidation. Subscriptions to scholarly journals are sold largely to librarians, either directly or via an agent. The librarian may take advice from others, such as departments’ library committees or from other library users, but will make a final choice based on the budget available. The journal may be bought as a single item, but more frequently today it will form part of a package of a number of journals, sometimes shared amongst several institutions in what is known as ‘consortia’. Academic papers are then typically made available through different portals or gateways shared by universities and the large database aggregators which manage the content. An academic’s Athens password is the key to unlock many of these invisible, but sometimes impenetrable, doors.

Now, we enter a battleground where publishers, research funders, government agencies and a few high-profile academics fiercely contest who has the right to control journal content. One argument is for ‘free access’, on the basis that research has already been paid for by the research funder or university (and ultimately the tax payer) and therefore should be freely available to all. Research councils in the UK, for example, issued a statement reinforcing their commitment:

‘…to the guiding principles that publicly funded research must be made available and accessible for public examination as rapidly as practical; published research outputs should be effectively peer-reviewed; this must be a cost effective use of public funds; and outputs must be preserved and remain accessible for future generations.’

(www.rcuk.ac.uk/research/outputs/access/)

The contrary argument is voiced by publishers who claim that they manage the peer review process, invest in sales and marketing and take financial risks with new journals and therefore should protect their ‘investment’. The current compromise between free and closed access is the ‘embargo’ model, where commercial publishers can restrict access to subscribers over journal content for a limited time...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Part I Setting Your Objectives
• Part II Knowing Your Audience
• Part III From Draft to Print
• References
• Index