Following on from our series examining issues relating to pulishing in academic journals. Here Katie Faulkner talks about the potential of publishing in postgraduate journals. Katie is the editor of immediations, the postgraduate research journal of the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she is also working towards a PhD in late Victorian sculpture and dress.

As PhD students we are constantly being told how important it is to have one or two publications under our belt when entering the job market. But sending off a manuscript you’ve endlessly agonized over and tweaked to an editorial board made up of, let’s face it, basically your academic heroes, can be an intimidating and nerve-wracking experience. Not to mention the wait of a year or more to see your words in shiny print. Postgraduate research journals, while they might not carry the same cachet as big name journals, can be a good way into getting published. After all, who’s going to be more sympathetic to your position than your fellow PhD students? Read more

This is the third and final part of a series of posts giving advice on how to get published in academic journals. This week Professor Chris Hamnett from the Geography Department at King’s College London offers advice on dealing with rejection and resubmission.

One of the toughest things young researchers have to deal with is the letter from the editor of the journal they submitted to saying ‘thanks, but no thanks’. The first thing to understand is that while total rejection letters are always tough to deal with, letters saying ‘no thanks’ but suggesting they are willing to consider resubmission are very common, perhaps even normal, and they are by no means confined to young researchers. If my experience is anything to go on (and it may not be), most researchers, however experienced and well known, have a nice file of ‘reject but resubmit’ letters. In fact, if I remember correctly, in the introduction to one of his classic early books, David Harvey recounted that he had a drawer full of rejections at the start of his career. It happens to everyone.

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Weekly Wisdom #34

If you haven’t before start taking an interest in grammar.

This weeks guest post comes from Dr Inger Mewburn who is a Research Fellow at RMIT University in Australia.  Inger does research on research education and writes about it.  Follow her on twitter and don’t forget to visit her blog The Thesis Whisperer.

I’ve been working in the research education field for some six years and continue to be surprised by the passive attitude of many students to publishing. Some seem actively scared of the process, or set their sights on lower ranked journals and conferences, perhaps because they are afraid of rejection. I think part of the problem is that students are not coached on developing a publishing strategy. A clear publishing strategy will help you get the most out of your study time and kick start your post doctoral career.
There’s three main reasons that you should publish while you are doing your research degree. All of these reasons will inform the outline of your publishing strategy

1) One of the ways in which examiners determine the quality of PhD is the extent to which it is publishable. If parts of the PhD have already been published this will give you some confidence about the outcome of the examination process.

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Right, so my thesis has been completed and examined and I passed subject to minor corrections, which were dutifully done within 3 months, so now what? Well, according to my examiners the first step in my post-doc life should be publishing a paper in to a good academic journal. This seems to make perfect sense however, at the same time it raises three important questions;

1.       What parts of my thesis would make good journal articles?

2.       What constitutes a good journal and how do I choose?

3.       What do I do if  my paper gets rejected?

Over the next three weeks we will consider all these issues with guest posts from Dr Inger Mewburn who writes about Journal selection and Professor Chris Hamnett who offers advice on dealing with rejections and resubmissions. In this post I will consider the first of these questions – what parts of my thesis would make good journal articles? Read more

Always good to have a reminder…

Weekly Wisdom #26

Be receptive to comments and advice!

This is a guest post from Tim Rutherford-Johnson, a freelance academic copy-editor who has seen it all and has the scars to prove it.

If you’ve not published before – or even if you have, but only in smaller magazines and journals – then you won’t have been copy-edited before. That will change when your first book is accepted for publication.

To the unsuspecting author, copy-editing can appear both frustratingly hands-off (so, there are no changes for pages – what are you doing after all?) and surprisingly invasive (you’ve re-written my entire bibliography – what’s up with that?). The truth is, copy-editing occupies a pretty undefined, liminal space between writing and mechanical proofreading. It’s less than one and more than the other, but beyond that there are no hard boundaries. Copy-editing is, however, an absolutely essential step between getting your book off your laptop and onto the shelves in Blackwell’s. Read more

Weekly Wisdom #11

Find a good (and preferably free) proof reader and get them to check your pitch and drafts well before your editor sees them!

Weekly Wisdom #10

Remember that good writing is about what you take out, not what you leave in!