Writing for Publication

Debbie Epstein, Jane Kenway, Rebecca Boden

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781473946170
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Research in Education

Writing for Publication deals with a number of generic issues around academic writing (including intellectual property rights) and then considers writing refereed journal articles, books and book chapters in detail as well as other, less common, forms of publication for academics. The aim is to demystify the process and to help you to become a confident, competent, successful and published writer.

1	Who should Use this Book and How?

 

 

This book will help you get going in the business of writing and to develop your writing skill further. It will also help you tackle the complex and sometimes bewildering processes involved in getting your research published in a variety of formats.

If this is the first book in the Academic’s Support Kit that you are reading, then you may find it useful to read ‘Introducing the Academic’s Support Kit’. Logically, if you are a beginning researcher you would be reading this book after Getting Started on Research. That said, it is never too soon to start thinking about and undertaking writing projects. If you have already read Getting Started on Research you will know that writing is an integral and on-going part of the research process which starts with your proposal and never comes to an end.

This book will be especially useful for you if you are:

 

• A research student who has yet to write for publication.
• Someone who has had an academic job for a while, but who has not yet got going with writing and publishing their research.
• Someone in their first academic job (with or without a research degree) who needs to acquire writing and publication skills.
• A more experienced academic who is mentoring someone in one or more of these categories.

 

You may:

 

• Want to overcome your anxieties about your writing and publishing.
• Wish to share your ideas, theories, thoughts and research findings with others.
• Need to develop your career profile. (For more advice about how to do this, you should read Building an Academic Career.)
• Be required to report to your research funders about the work they have paid for.
• Be under pressure from your employing institution to publish your research work.
• Be a successful writer and publisher yourself but need to know how to help others do the same.

 

Looking back at this list, it’s apparent that there are two explanations of why people write and publish their research. The first explanation is that writing and publication are fundamental to the process of being an academic. It is imperative for researchers to engage in academic debate and discussion and tell other people what they are doing in their own work. In short, there’s very little point to researching unless you are going to be able to tell people about your work.

The second explanation is to do with institutional pressures on and controls over academic work. Managers like to manage what they can measure, and publication represents a tangible and supposedly measurable output of the process of thinking and intellectual work. It is, therefore, easy to see why publication has become a yardstick for institutions and their funders. We think it’s really important that academics do publish, but when the measurement of publication (either by volume, perceived quality or use by others) becomes a management tool, it can generate perverse incentives that distort the real intellectual value of the publication process. In short, the tail starts wagging the dog.

Publication can be used as quite a strict management tool, so be aware that you are very likely to come under these sorts of pressures. This is a great shame, because we think that writing and publication for what we regard as the ‘right’ academic reasons should be one of the most fun and rewarding aspects of being an academic. Consider the story below of how a group of academics lost their jobs because of their perceived failure to publish enough.

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It all adds up to a pretty Brum do

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In theory, things couldn’t look brighter for higher education: a government commitment to increase student numbers by 2010; superb research assessment exercise scores in 2001; a ‘demonstrable improvement’ in teaching quality; and an acknowledgement by the Higher Education Funding Council for England that there will have to be a net rise of between 15,000 and 17,000 academic staff in universities by 2010.

But a harsh reality belies this picture. Of late, there have been wholesale departmental closures, cost-cutting regimes, widespread redundancies and bottom-lines slipping badly into the red.

Academics need to pay attention to what is happening in their own backyards before it is too late. The closure of the department of cultural studies and sociology at Birmingham University is a perfect case study.

Cultural studies at Birmingham has been the single most internationally influential academic group in the creation and development of the discipline. It achieved a perfect 24 in its last teaching quality assessment, student demand was buoyant and it was financially sound.

In the 2001 RAE, [Research Assessment Exercise] its entry was changed, without consultation, by senior managers with no expertise in the discipline. The head of department protested, predicting that this would damage the score. The result was a grading of 3a. Management decided that no score of less than 4 could be tolerated and moved to ‘restructure’ the department. All staff have taken what is technically voluntary severance, under conditions they maintain amount to duress.

This story tells us four things. First, it demonstrates a massive divergence between the world of academics and the management elite. The work of academics achieves and sustains the reputation of an institution, while managers, driven by different norms and values, have the power of life or death. Thus, the global academic outcry against the closure has fallen on the cloth ears of managers dedicated to the crudest forms of ‘rational management’.

Second, it shows the power of pseudo-objective exercises such as the RAE. Staff were judged on the basis of a submission not of their own writing, under a research assessment regime not of their making, and were deemed to have ‘failed’. The objectivity of the RAE gave management’s judgements apparently greater legitimacy and authority than the outcry of academics worldwide.

Third, it demonstrates the extent to which managers fail to think strategically or in a businesslike way. The next RAE will take place in 2008 (not 2006 as Birmingham anticipated) under a scheme yet to be determined by Sir Gareth Roberts’ review. Birmingham’s managers have made short-term decisions based on the expectation of the continued application of a research assessment system that they already know to be defunct.

Further, the department represented an important ‘brand’, crucial to attracting students, especially foreign ones, and staff. That brand has now been destroyed.

Fourth, the plight of the former staff exemplifies the disciplinary nature of the relationship between management and academics. Academics are subject to many different performance audit regimes, and management can choose arbitrarily which to act on. In this case, management used a ‘failure’ when it suited them, while ignoring concurrent audit ‘successes’. Research and pedagogic success, in academics’ terms and those of management, continues to go unrewarded while failure, as determined by management, is brutally punished.

Such an analysis will have little comfort for those who have lost their jobs and for Birmingham’s academic community. The rest of us ignore the lessons at our peril.

(Rebecca Boden and Debbie Epstein, Times Higher Education
Supplement, 20 September 2002)

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Remember that writing and publication are important academic activities that bring real rewards. There is little more satisfying than getting your first article or book published and feeling that you have produced something of real value. The secret is to learn to get what you need out of the activity in order to work well as a professional and enjoy yourself, whilst managing and balancing the adverse (and sometimes perverse) institutional pressures. This book is meant to help you achieve that balance.

Before going on, we’d like to introduce some characters who might benefit from reading this book.

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Jonny has been an academic for a number of years. His institution made a shift to becoming research-led and he decided to become a researcher. He registered for a part-time PhD in history. When he was planning his PhD, aware of institutional pressures to publish (and the career benefits of so doing), he designed his thesis so that he could publish papers on aspects of his work as he went along. He ended up writing papers in tandem with particular chapters of his thesis. He struggled with the first paper – he had excellent data but found difficulty in shaping it into an argument for an article. He got three professors in his department and his supervisor/adviser to help him to restructure his writing. When everyone was happy that the paper was in good shape, he submitted it to a prestigious journal and it was accepted with only minor revisions. He was absolutely delighted when his paper was accepted and got promoted shortly afterwards. He is now writing a second paper in tandem with the next chapter of his thesis.

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Claudia has become an academic as a second career. She was not well advised about her writing and publication in the first few years of her academic job and, as a result, had no publications to contribute when her department’s research output was audited. Her confidence was severely damaged by this experience and she seriously considered giving up her academic career. Rather than do that, she worked hard with her newly acquired mentor to develop some of her existing work for presentation at a small, friendly conference and subsequent publication in a refereed journal. Her success in this regard boosted her confidence sufficiently that she decided to begin her PhD, with her mentor as her supervisor. She is now working on a second paper.

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Bina has a first-class degree in mathematics. She subsequently became a schoolteacher and undertook an MA in the Sociology of Education, which required her to begin to think and write sociologically instead of mathematically. She is now becoming a confident writer although she originally thought that she would never be able to write sociology (rather than maths). She has a couple of publications to her credit and is thinking about how to develop her writing and publication profile.

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2	The Business of Writing

In this chapter we address a number of generic issues around the business of writing, before moving on in subsequent chapters to discuss specific writing forms and publication formats.

Read this!

Like small children, before you can write you have to be able to read – and, in your case, read research. Good reading habits are helpful in two ways. First, writing and publishing can be thought of as joining in an academic discussion, albeit a written one at a slow speed. Unless you are abreast of what others are saying, you won’t know what constitutes a valuable, valid and interesting intervention by you. Second, like any other skill, writing is one that you have to learn and keep developing. By critically reading others’ work you should be able to learn what works well and what doesn’t.

Your reading needs to be systematic and rigorous. If you are developing good research skills it is highly likely that you will have begun to develop good reading skills, as you can’t have the first without the second. Some people with good scholarship practices will already have good reading skills, but will not necessarily be undertaking their own research.

Handy hints for effective reading

Even though you may already have good reading habits, we thought it worthwhile recapping here the things about reading that help with writing.

1. Get the habit

All academics have really busy lives. Stuff like regular reading of things that will augment your basic knowledge base (as opposed to reading things you have to) often slips off the edge of our mental in-trays. Try to avoid relegating this activity to those non-existent periods when you ‘have time’ by building a regular reading slot into eve...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introducing the Academic’s Support Kit
• 1 Who should Use this Book and How?
• 2 The Business of Writing
• 3 The Business of Publishing
• 4 Publishing Articles in Academic Journals
• 5 Publishing Books and in Books
• 6 Other Sorts of Publishing
• Further Reading
• Index