Collingwood21: Published Writer (Getting your work published.)

Name: collingwood21

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Product:	Getting your work published.
Date:	04/04/08 (243 review reads)
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Advantages: Feels fantastic to see your work in print

Disadvantages: A lot of hard work and you don't always get paid

Unsurprisingly for someone who has loitered around dooyoo for seven years, one of my ambitions from childhood was to be a published writer. I have written regularly since I started primary school, where a couple of wonderful teachers were very influential in encouraging my ambition and love of words; by the time I was 10, such was my verbosity that it became a running joke in my class that I had "swallowed a dictionary"! I wrote all sorts at this time, but most of all I loved writing stories; it was ambition for a long time to be a novelist when I grew up*. Unfortunately, the bog-standard comprehensive I later attended had no such lofty ideals about encouraging their pupils in their creative ambitions, and my imagination became slowly stifled under a nebulous mass of quadratic equations, industrial revolutions and half-hearted cookery lessons**. This would now be an excellent point at which to say I had risen above the constrictions of secondary school and published a novel to rapturous applause and widespread critical acclaim, wouldn't it? Sadly, no (or at least not yet). No novel, no critical acclaim...but I have been published (well, I couldn't very well write in this category if I hadn't, could I?). It was perhaps not what I had envisioned as a child when I dreamed of being a published writer, but I have fulfilled that ambition in a way (even if you don't count the short story that appeared in CHAT magazine some years ago - but we won't go there).

While it may be true that all the schooling I have been subjected too may have squashed some of my earlier creativity, it has had it benefits - not least in providing me with a different form of writing to agonise over. While academic writing may lack the creative flair of story telling, in many ways it suited me rather well, as it favoured the sort of wordiness I already had. Academic writing is all about describing what you have to say in a very precise and stylised manner, following the conventions of your discipline; usually, this is very formal (most disciplines will not accept first person narratives for instance), with statements needing to be supported by properly referencing other authors who have published in appropriate sources. Admittedly, it is often quite dry as a result of this striving for precision and backing by what other people have published, but more importantly for me, however, academic writing is not exactly averse to the sort of verbosity that I often write with.

While I had been producing academic writing for some time as a student, my experience with getting it published really began at the end of my viva examination for my thesis. The last 20 minutes of my exam was spent with me discussing with the examiners how I could publish my research (or "dissemination of knowledge", as they put it). This sort of discussion is invaluable for students, as it gives the benefit of the experience of the examiners, who also know your work well enough to offer guidance on where to target different aspects of your research, and which elements would work as stand-alone papers. If you are a postgraduate student, it is well worth trying to have such a conversation with your tutors or examiners about possible publication (undergraduate dissertations are unlikely to be substantive enough to become a paper in their own right without extra work/research, and only then when there is something sufficiently novel or important for journals to consider accepting it). I was offered very useful advice, and armed with these recommendations, I set about working on my first paper shortly afterwards (yes, I know that some PhD students publish during their studies, but I was recommended by my supervisor that I was better off concentrating on just the thesis - and that publication might undermine the originality element of the thesis by the time it reached the examination stage).

I started off by picking the easiest "target" in the form of a short paper to a professional journal offering an update to an earlier group of articles that had been published by them some fifteen years earlier. The paper would need to be shorter than ones for academic journals, and the editorial requirements would be less strict, as there would be no need for refereeing in this case. This was simply*** a case of turning a section of my literature review and bibliography into a coherent article in its own right. I knew that the journal only published once a year, so I emailed the editor straight away to ask if they would be interested in such a paper, and if so, what the deadline was for that year's edition. I was lucky; the editor was interested, and the deadline was in three months time, so I got my first paper in print less than six months after my thesis passed.

Paper number two was aimed at an academic peer-reviewed journal, and was based on a theme from my thesis. This was the first time my work was to appear in a "proper" academic journal, and despite all I had heard about how hard and frustrating a process this can be, I found this experience to be really positive. After submitting my paper, the referees for the journal sent back three pages of comments - which I found a little daunting! - but the editor of the journal couldn't have been more helpful. He could see from my bio that I was a new PhD graduate and guessed I didn't have much experience in publishing, so offered to talk me through the changes he would like over the phone. This was a hugely beneficial experience, as it allowed me to find out just what he liked and what he thought could be improved upon, expressed more clearly, or restructured. I was able to confidently make the suggested amendments and get the article accepted for publication a couple of weeks later. This gave me the confidence I needed to write paper number three, to a more highly regarded academic journal - which is still stuck somewhere in the editorial process, although I do have hopes that it will one day be accepted for publication.

My tips for publishing academic work:
1) It is better to chose a journal and then write an article for it, than to write the article and then decide who to send it to. With your article topic in mind, research journals that cover the same field; having researched (and probably done an awful lot of reading) in an area, you should have some idea of the journals that you wish to target, but it is also useful to look up listings in academic libraries for further ideas.

2) Remember that there are different types of journals - would your research be more appropriate to a professional than an academic publication, for example? The gold standard for academic publications is that they are peer reviewed (sometimes known as "refereeing"), which means that your submission gets screened by two or three anonymous experts in the field who provide feedback on it before an editorial decision on acceptance is made. The idea behind peer reviewing is that it improves the reliability, credibility and quality of published research: referees can give constructive criticism to the author by highlighting areas in the research that they think requires more work, suggesting improvements for the way an article is written, and offering advice on further reading, for example, and also give a recommendation on whether an article should be carried by the journal or not. This means that having an article appear in a peer-reviewed journal is a longer and harder process than publishing elsewhere, but it means your work is more respected because of the scrutiny it has gone through to get there.

3) Having selected your target journal, carefully read through the requirements for authors that the journal provides. Each journal will have this information clearly displayed on its website as well as in each journal, and will include points such as word length, style guide, abstract or keyword requirements, how to submit your paper, and how many copies to submit. Pay close attention to these instructions! You don't want to spend months researching and writing a paper only to reduce your chances of getting it published because of discrepancies with the requirements of the journal you send it to.

4) Once you have written your paper, have a break from it for several days, and then read it through afresh. After a break, you will find it easier to pick up typos and sections that don't read clearly, and to spot mistakes, omissions and sections that aren't properly referenced. It is also a good idea to double-check your bibliography at this point - make sure all cited works are listed in full, all listed bibliographic works are cited in the text, the bibliography is in the correct order and the format meets any stylistic requirements (although most journals seem to opt for the Harvard system), and that your references are sufficient in number and breadth to satisfy the referees (N.B. referencing Wikipedia is generally not a good idea!). You might also want to let someone else to read it through to check for clarity; what is clearly obvious to you as the author may not be obvious to someone new to the subject.

5) Be patient. Don't bombard the editor or journal administrator with emails or phone calls, especially if you are submitting to a peer-reviewed journal, as the process is a long one. An acknowledgement should be sent to you when your paper is received, but it can take anything up to six months for a paper to emerge the other side of the reviewing process in my experience. I was advised that if you haven't heard anything after 4-5 months to send a polite enquiry to the journal, but nothing before that.

6) If you are sent feedback from referees or editors, with publication being conditional on amendments, then don't take it as an insult. Everyone gets this - even top academics! Accept the feedback with good grace, and use the comments to improve your paper. If there is something you especially disagree with, then discuss it with the journal editor, but be prepared to take the criticism of more experienced writers, researchers and academics than you.

7) Be patient again. After you have submitted your amended paper it will take yet more time for busy editors to approve it, schedule it to appear in a journal, and then for it to go through the publication process. Many journals are only published three or four times a year, and if there is a queue of articles waiting to appear, it can take months for your accepted script to finally get into print. There is nothing unusual in a year passing between first submission and final publication!

Although getting published in academic journals is a lot of (unpaid) work, I think it is worth putting the effort in if you have a suitable thesis or other research to take a paper from. After all, if you have done the research, you might as well let other people know about it! It does feel very satisfying seeing your work in print - even if it isn't the novel you hoped for.


Useful further reading: Murray, R (2005) "Writing for academic journals", Open University Press.


*It might still be actually - it depends whether you consider me to have "grown up" yet.
**My verbosity and frequently pompous use of language remained stubbornly intact, however.
***I say "simply", but it actually took several weeks worth of evening and weekends while I was working full time.

Summary: My experiences of being published