I’m using Wendy Laura Belcher’s book Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing
Success to prepare my paper for publication. This is Week Four
Week Four is devoted to selecting a journal. Belcher argues
that many journals need authors (and their papers) even more than scholars need
journals. According to her, only a fraction of academic journals has a rejection
rate of 90% or above, and authors just need to find suitable journals where
their chances of acceptance are higher
As usual, on the first day, I read the workbook. I spent the
second day searching for journals. My first step was to ask several people in
the field (of communication studies) for advice on where to send my paper,
which gave me 2 journals. Then, I did an old-fashioned shelf search at the
library. The search took me awhile, and I was able to find only 2 additional
journals. My next step was looking through various (inter)disciplinary electronic
databases and playing around with keywords. I spent about 2 hours on that and located
4 more journals, which brought the total to 8. During the third day, I worked
on filling Belcher’s review form for each of these journals. The form contains
the title of the journal, the name and contact information of its editor, other
additional facts about the journal (i.e., whether it’s peer reviewed, whether
its editorial office is U.S. based, type of the journal, its longevity and
reputation, no. of articles a year, word/page limits, style manual, board members
I know, etc.). I spent the fourth day reading the journals I selected. I
started with looking through their tables of content, which immediately eliminated
3 journals, leaving me with 5, 2 of which I crossed off my list because soon they
will go through a transition and have new editors starting January 2015.
Belcher strongly recommends to avoid submitting a paper to journals which are
about to have new editors, new titles, new publishers, etc. Thus, I was left
with 3 potential publication outlets. Then, I spent several hours skimming through
the recent issues of these journals and closely reading some of their articles.
On the fifth day, I was supposed to write query letters to editors asking about
the number of submissions the journal receives a year, the journal’s turnaround
time, its backlog, etc. For some reason, I felt uncomfortable about writing to
the editors and was unable to get over that. So I decided for now just to make
informal inquiries about people’s experiences with those journals and to write a
massage to the associate editor of one of the journals whom I’m briefly acquainted
with. And that’s what I did.
Overall, Week Five went well. Although I haven’t decided on
a specific journal where to send my paper or haven’t been able to start catching
up on the tasks I hadn’t accomplished during the first three weeks, I did practically
everything that I was supposed to do this week. I also have come closer to
making a decision on where to submit and reduced the number of possible
journals. One of the three that are left seems less attractive than the rest, because
of its content and because it requires MLA style while my paper is currently in
APA. Hopefully, I would get more info on one of the other two journals from its
associated editor, and then I’ll be able to make a decision. And, if my paper gets
rejected, I still would have another journal where I can submit.
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