How to Publish an Article in an Academic Journal: Avoid Rookie Mistakes

If you are reading this, I likely don’t need to tell you about the importance of publishing scholarly articles to get an academic position or, if you have one, to secure tenure or promotion. Instead, I’d like to offer you some tips that might help you get your research published.



I am writing this post because I have reviewed an insane amount of articles over the past few months, and have noticed that many of these articles should never have been sent out for review, because they were missing key components.

The authors of these articles thus waited three months for someone to tell them that they do not have a clear argument, that there is no literature review, or that they need to describe their ethnographic methods. Sometimes they waited this long or longer only to hear other fairly generic advice.

I am in the process of submitting an article to a journal. I am thus writing this post both to make sure that I practice what I preach, and to offer some examples from my own writing that might be useful as you prepare your own article.

Some questions to ask yourself

First of all, before you send an empirical social science article out for review, ask yourself these questions:

1. What is your research question?
2. How is your research question related to the current literature?
3. How will you use your data to answer your research question?

Before you send a piece off, make sure that a) you can answer these questions; and b) that anyone that reads your paper also can answer these questions.

I have reviewed twenty papers and books in the first half of this year. Many of the articles received rejections because the articles did not have all the necessary pieces or because the pieces did not have the necessary elements. Thus, make sure that your paper has all of the following elements.

(This post is primarily directed at authors of empirical social science articles, but let me know in the comments how this might be adjusted for other fields.)

Introduction

The introduction should contain a brief summary of the literature with which you will engage, a research question that derives from that literature, and a brief explanation of how you will answer that question.

For example, I am writing an article that engages with two distinct bodies of literature: scholarship on race and incarceration and scholarship on immigrant incorporation. My introduction has one paragraph on each of those bodies of literature, followed by a statement of the research questions and the methods.

“This paper brings the literature on immigrant incorporation into conversation with the literature on mass incarceration through a consideration of these two research questions: 

1. How has mass deportation affected the incorporation trajectories of black male immigrants?
2. What role does gendered structural racism play in blocking the mobility of black male immigrants? 

I draw from interviews with 83 Jamaican and Dominican immigrants to answer these questions.”

I then use two more paragraphs to define the conceptual terms I am using – particularly “gendered structural racism.”

Literature Review

Some of the papers I reviewed simply did not have literature reviews. Others made the rookie mistake of a serial literature review – where the author discusses one piece of scholarship per paragraph yet does not put the works into conversation with each other. The literature review must synthesize the literature and point directly to your research questions.

You can tell you are doing this if you have sentences that look like this:

“Immigration scholars argue that there are distinct paths to becoming part of society and refer to this process as segmented assimilation. These sociologists argue that immigrants who arrive in the country as youth experience either 1) assimilation into mainstream society; 2) selective acculturation; or 3) downward assimilation (Portes and Zhou 1993; Zhou 1997; Portes and Rumbaut 2001).”

You are not doing this if you have several paragraphs that each begin with: “Portes and Rumbaut (2001) argue…. Zhou (1997) argues…..” Synthesis is key here.

My literature review begins with a section on the collateral consequences of mass incarceration, which ends with the statement:

“As scholars get a handle on the collateral consequences of mass incarceration, it is crucial to also pay attention to the collateral consequences of mass deportation.”

The next section is on crimmigration, where I explain how immigration and criminal law enforcement have merged. This section is more background than literature review, and I have gone back and forth about where to put it. For now, it is between the first main section of the literature review and the last, which is on deportation and immigrant incorporation.

The subsection on immigration incorporation begins with:

“Whereas scholars who write about the urban African American experience often highlight the impact of mass incarceration, those who focus on black immigrants rarely mention heavy policing or mass incarceration. Whereas immigration scholars often focus on attitudes and identities, scholars of mass incarceration argue that, regardless of your attitude, U.S. drug laws are so draconian that it becomes difficult for any black or Latino male youth to avoid the criminal justice system, particularly if he lives in a primarily non-white neighborhood (Alexander 2011; Western 2006). This raises the question of how gendered structural racism affects the incorporation trajectories of black male immigrant youth.”

This is followed by a discussion of the prevailing literature on immigrant incorporation - the segmented assimilation discussion mentioned above.

Make sure that your literature review points directly at your research questions.

Argument

Every article needs an argument. You can state your argument in the introduction, in the abstract, and/or in the literature review. You need an argument, however, in order to get published. Here’s mine:

“I argue that a primary factor contributing to their arrest and incarceration was gendered structural racism – not oppositional attitudes. Neither ethnic cohesion nor Anglo-conformity protected these black male immigrants from being funneled into the criminal justice system.”

Note: If your paper is quantitative, you will need hypotheses. In my view, you don’t need these for qualitative papers.

Methods

My article is based on ethnography and interviews, so the methods section is pretty straightforward. I discuss how long the ethnographic research lasted (9 months); how many interviews (83); and the case selection – why I interviewed deportees in Jamaica and the Dominican Republic, and why most of my interviewees are men.

Data and Analysis

This is the meat of your paper – where your original contribution lies. The main trick here is to make sure that you deploy your data to answer your research questions.

In my paper, I am trying to show that black male immigrants who were on a path to mainstream assimilation, who engaged in selective acculturation, and who experienced downward assimilation all met a similar fate – they ended up arrested, incarcerated, and deported. My objective is to show that their attitudes about school and their future goals were not the reason they were deported. Instead, they were deported because they live in heavily policed neighborhoods, were racially profiled, and faced a punitive legal and immigration system. Thus, I divide my discussion of data and methods into those three sections.

Many qualitative papers fail to analyze their data. You not only need to tell us what you learned from your interviews and ethnography; you also need to analyze each piece of data you provide. Tell the reader what it means and why it’s important.

Conclusion

I have not thus far rejected an article for not having a good conclusion – although I did receive one that completely lacked a conclusion. And, that did not look good.

In any event, a good conclusion can only strengthen your article and make it more likely that your findings will be understood and disseminated.

In my conclusion, I reiterate my findings, mention any possible limitations, and explore directions for future research.

Here is my restatement of my main argument:

“Some of these youth assimilated to the local subcultures in their neighborhoods. Others maintained strong ethnic ties. Still others had high aspirations about becoming part of mainstream society. None of these paths, however, could protect them from the consequences of heavy policing in their neighborhoods.”

I think I am nearly ready to submit. How about you?

How to Choose an Academic Journal for your Article ... and why you should choose one now!

Most academics are aware of the need to "publish or perish," and the current state of the job market makes the imperative to publish even more pressing. In this post, I discuss the first step to publishing a journal article: choosing an academic journal for your article.

The past few posts this semester have dealt with learning skills that enhance your scholarly productivity, including: planning your Fall semester, making time for writing, planning your week, and writing every day.

Time management and daily writing are skills and habits you can learn by practice. For example, I learned about the skill of daily writing in a class on writing with Sherryl Kleinman in 2004. However, I did not form the habit of daily writing until I joined an online discussion forum organized by Kerry Ann Rockquemore in 2007. That discussion forum encouraged participants to develop the habit of daily writing, and it worked wonders for my productivity. If daily writing has not yet become a habit for you, check out this post for more strategies on how to make writing part of your life.

Similar to time management and daily writing, publishing is also a skill you can learn. No academic was born knowing how to publish. We all learn by doing. The more you write and submit articles, the easier it gets. For the remainder of the semester, we will focus on the nuts and bolts of writing and publishing, drawing from my own experience publishing ten journal articles and two books and reading about academic publishing in venues such as Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success, by Wendy Belcher. This post is dedicated to explaining how to find a home for your academic article. However, if you do not already have Wendy Belcher's book, I suggest you order it now!

How to Choose an Academic Journal

If you do not yet have an article ready for submission, there is no need to worry. You can decide where you will submit your article before you begin to write it. However, if you are reading this blog, it is likely that you have at least one seminar paper, thesis draft, or dissertation chapter that you could transform into a publishable article. If not, with daily writing, you will have a draft in no time.

Look in your bibliography
The first place to look for an appropriate journal to publish your article is in your own bibliography. The works you have cited are the works with which you are engaging in conversation. If you are citing several articles from a particular journal, that is a good sign that journal may be an appropriate place to submit your article.

Find other journals in your area
After looking through your own citations, have a look at other journals in your field. You can do this online. However, it can also be a great experience to actually go into the library and have a look at the journals in person. You also can ask your librarian area specialist. Many colleges and universities have librarians whose job requires expertise in academic publications. They can be a great resource when considering where to submit your article.

Figure out the impact factor and journal rankings
Journal ratings are important. A journal's rating is based on a variety of metrics, which are different ways of counting how many times the articles in the journal have been cited. Articles that have been cited more often are thought to have a greater impact in the field, and thereby bring prestige to the journal in which they were published.

Because journal ratings are important, you should take them into account before making a final decision about where to submit your article. Here are three ways to find out information on the relative quality of a journal.

1. You can use the software, Publish or Perish, to get data on the impact factor and citation rate of journals in your field.
2. You can access Web of Knowledge through your university's library to get rankings of the journals in a particular area or discipline. For example, Web of Knowledge lists rankings within the discipline of Sociology, but also within the sub-field of Race and Ethnic Relations.
3. You can visit the journal's website to find out information about the journal in question. When investigating a particular journal, you should try to figure out whether or not the articles in the journal are peer-reviewed, what percentage of submitted articles they accept, and whether or not the journal is accessible through major scholarly databases such as JSTOR, Elsevier, or Sage.

Once you have chosen a journal, you can begin to write or revise your article with an eye towards publication in that journal.