Sunday, September 04, 2011

Submitting article manuscripts

From Inside Higher Ed, some good advice about sending article manuscripts out for review.  It is really important to be thinking about the most appropriate journal while you are writing.  Choosing an inappropriate journal can needlessly waste you months of time.  Your topic, argument, methodology, etc. are best for some journals and not others, so it is an important decision.

I would add that journals change over time, especially as editors come and go, so go over the table of contents of recent issues.  Very literally, an article that might have been published five or so years ago might not get consideration today.  And vice versa.

On the other hand, I would ignore the advice about removing your own published works from the bibliography in order to retain anonymity and replacing them with "Author."  I have never heard of this, and it is excessive.  In fact, if I were a reviewer I would find it annoying.

1 comments:

RAJ 12:41 PM  

Great advice; I would add that far too many junior scholars of my acquaintance aim at lower ranking journals without thinking about who the actual audience is for their work.

The practice of replacing your own name with "author" is used in some anthropology journals-- including American Anthropologist, the main journal of the American Anthropological Association-- in an attempt to produce double-blind reviewing. I can't say I think it works-- even with only around 10,000 or so members, the chances that an appropriate reviewer will not know who "author" is are slim.

This underlines the importance of reading the guidelines for a specific journal-- the ones where I have served on editorial boards all have had an astonishing number of papers come in over-length or without required elements (abstract, keywords, etc) which again, delays review.

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