There’s much to be said for e-journals. They save trees. Vast collections can be saved on a hard or flash drive, or on our newest shelf, the Cloud. Any of them can be read on an iPad or Kindle or a computer screen. Shipping costs are nil. Searching is incredibly easy. Entire libraries are accessible on line. An individual article can be purchased without a year’s subscription.
But e-journals have a couple of serious downsides: cost of publication and access, and journal issue preservation.
At a brainstorming session on academic publishing at TAA’s June 2012 conference, a participant asked how to determine the most prestigious journals in which to try to publish. The panel’s advice: study the journal impact factors.
An impact factor is widely regarded as a measure of the journal’s importance in the particular disciplines which it serves. A journal’s impact factor is a measure of the average frequency with which articles in a given journal’s publication year are cited in that and other journals during the subsequent two years. The rationale is, roughly, that the citation rate of articles in a given journal, compared with the rate of “competing” journals, gives a metrical measure of that journal’s perceived importance in the discipline. Seems simple enough, but perhaps not.
Deciding where to submit your journal article can be a daunting task. Not all journals are created equal. Journals differ in content and, of course, in the more elusive, status within the discipline. What I will write about here is how to select and refine your submission based on the journal’s status within your discipline. Two strategies can smooth out the submission process. The first strategy illustrates one way to decide on the journal in which you want to publish. The second strategy is how to analyze the articles within that selected journal to focus your writing to that audience.
Jay Black, co-editor of the Journal of Mass Media Ethics, and Charles Holland, professor emeritus of chemical engineering at Texas A&M University, share the following tips for getting published:
Black: “Get familiar with the journal – don’t submit blindly. Skim through several issues and find the journal’s pattern, topics, style, etc. If your article is too long or not in the required style, it shows that its not really focused. Don’t give up. Eighty percent of resubmitted articles are accepted.”
Money, establishing tenure and a passion for ideas are just a few of the many primary and secondary motives for publishing, said sociologist Mark Schneider and linguist Joan Friedenberg, both of Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.
Many of these motives, they said, can be fulfilled by different types of academic publishing. They have come up with 20 ways to get published in an academic environment. They are:
When I finally got around to writing my dissertation (that’s another story), I realized that its organization easily fell into several relatively self-contained chapters. Once I defended, I needed to convert as much of the dissertation to publishable articles as I could, for the “hound of tenure” was fast on my heels.
I realized that I had written each chapter with a possible article based on it already in mind. In philosophy one often takes on positions articulated by others, and seeks to attack them in a way that makes one’s own view more plausible and defended against those who would, or should, attack it. So, I “carved” the dissertation into three chunks and wrote them up as independent articles. I sent them to the same journals that had published the articles I was attacking, and they were accepted (usually subject to some revisions). Hence, my first three publications, followed by a fourth when one of my attackees sought to defend himself in print. Those, plus a couple of short pieces, secured a tenured appointment.
