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Scholarly Publishing

A guide to issues in scholarly communication, including publishing, open access, copyright, and author rights.

This page covers basics related to where you choose to publish:

  • Journal Article
  • Book
  • Online

Write a Journal Article

Audience and Purpose

There are two major differences between writing for a course vs. writing for a publication.

Audience:

Your audience (or readers) when you write for publication is much larger than when you write for a course. Anyone who reads the publication is in your audience, so you will want to think about:

  • who they are
  • what they already know
  • how your writing contributes to their understanding of the topic/field

Depending on where you publish, your audience could be very big (e.g., if you publish in a major newspaper or magazine) and/or have varying degrees of previous knowledge about the topic.

The audience for a scholarly publication will likely already know a good deal about your topic, whereas the audience in a popular/news publication may or may not already know a lot about it.

Carefully consider your piece's audience as you write it. This will influence your tone, vocabulary, length, level of depth, etc.

Purpose:

Purpose and Audience are related -- who you are writing for will influence what you want the audience to do/think/feel after reading.

Think carefully about why you are writing. Some questions to ask:

  • What genre am I writing in? (You will write differently if you are writing an editorial vs. a scholarly paper, or a book chapter vs. a poem)
  • Who needs to read this to understand this topic?
  • What do I hope they will do/think/feel after reading?
  • What do they already know and what do I need to explain?
  • What level of knowledge does my audience already have?
  • What are their goals/hopes/objectives in reading this and how can I best leverage this in my writing?
Writing for a Course Writing for a Publication
Audience made up of professor/classmates (narrow) Audience made up of readers of publication (can be wide)
Purpose is to show your understanding/knowledge Purpose can be to share information; add to the field/ describe to the public
Guidelines are set by the professor or program Clear guidelines such a citation style, etc. set by the publication
Longevity generally limited to length of course Work may be influential or existent for a long period of time

 

Submit your work for publication to reputable, peer-reviewed academic journals to establish yourself as a valued researcher in your discipline. Considerations in the process include the journal's scope, any restrictions it imposes on manuscript types or topics, and various measures used to gauge the journal's impact.

With so many journals in publication, it can be daunting to find the ideal journal to which you might submit your manuscript. There are several free tools to match manuscripts to potential journals for publication that might be helpful. Most of them work the same way. Enter your manuscript title, keywords, the field of research, and sometimes an abstract, and then it will match journals for your work. Some have limiters to help you narrow your results from there. The major publishers have each created their own versions of a journal finder for their journal publications. The free tools often ask you to set up an account. Here are links to some of these tools:

Consider which type of journal in which you want to publish.

  • Do you want to publish in a proprietary journal requiring a subscription so only scholars connected to institutions with subscriptions can access your work?
  • Do you want to have your work freely available for anyone to read, granting the widest possible readership?

If you have received funding, you may need to consider the wishes of the grant or agency that funded your research as more funders are requiring Open Access publication of research findings.

Subscription Journals

Subscription journals are publications only available with a fee, or found behind a paywall when you discover them online. The author signs a contract with the publisher establishing who owns the rights regarding the content. These vary by publisher, and authors should research the rights the publisher grants before signing a contract. Refer to the following resources for information about publication agreements:

Open Access

Open Access (OA) journals are available to anyone on the web. They have a variety of publishing models, some that require authors to pay to publish in them, and others that are funded in alternate ways allowing authors to publish in them for free. Read the specific requirements for any journal you decide to pursue for publication. Additionally, you will need to determine how you will allow the public to use your work, by selecting a Creative Commons license before you publish your work on the web.

The advantages of OA journals are:

  • increased usage
  • increased citations
  • increased collaboration

Below are some tools to locate OA journals in which to publish.

Impact Factors

Impact Factors (IF) are used to measure the importance of a journal by calculating the number of times selected articles are cited within a particular year. The higher the number of citations or articles coming from a particular journal, or impact factor, the higher it is ranked. IF is also a powerful tool if you want to compare journals in a subject category.

Impact factors may be used by:

  • Authors - to decide where to submit an article for publication
  • Libraries - to make decisions about which journals to subscribe to
  • Academic departments - to assess faculty academic productivity
  • Academic administration - to make decisions on faculty promotion and tenure

Journal Metrics Tools

Refer to Elsevier: Measuring a Journal's Impact for popular citation-based metrics employed at the journal level.

"Metrics have become a fact of life in many - if not all - fields of research and scholarship. In an age of information abundance (often termed ‘information overload’), having a shorthand for the signals for where in the ocean of published literature to focus our limited attention has become increasingly important.

Research metrics are sometimes controversial, especially when in popular usage they become proxies for multidimensional concepts such as research quality or impact. Each metric may offer a different emphasis based on its underlying data source, method of calculation, or context of use. For this reason, Elsevier promotes the responsible use of research metrics encapsulated in two “golden rules”. Those are: always use both qualitative and quantitative input for decisions (i.e. expert opinion alongside metrics), and always use more than one research metric as the quantitative input. This second rule acknowledges that performance cannot be expressed by any single metric, as well as the fact that all metrics have specific strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, using multiple complementary metrics can help to provide a more complete picture and reflect different aspects of research productivity and impact in the final assessment."

If you want to explore detailed information about Journal Metrics, Impact Factors, Journal Rankings, etc., visit the following online guides from other universities:

Journal Indexing

When selecting a journal, it's important to know where that journal is indexed. In other words, which databases will add this to their collection and thus make it searchable to a wider audience? Finding out this information can be helpful, so you know how far your publication may reach. Ulrich's Web can be a useful tool to discover this information, as it lists indexing locations under "Online Availability."

Find the Submission Guidelines - Journal or Publisher Website

When submitting to publishers, it's important to check each journal's requirements for submission guidelines. You can often find these on the individual journal's website, or the publisher's author portal.

Major Journal Publishers - Author Portals:

Write a Book

Publishing your dissertation as a book is not without its challenges, however, if you are willing to put in a lot of hard work and revisions, it is a possibility. Keep in mind that academic book publishing is highly competitive, even for established scholars. If you decide you are up for the challenge, be aware of the following:

Dissertations and academic books have different purposes.

  • The purpose of a dissertation is conducting primary research.
  • The purpose of a book is to share your findings with a larger audience.

Converting a dissertation into a book will take A LOT of revision. For example, those detailed methodological descriptions you spent countless hours on as a primary focus may only end up in a book appendix, if they are included at all.

Academic publishers typically require a book proposal or prospectus rather than a full-length manuscript. Your book proposal will likely include:

  • summary of your research
  • summary of your findings
  • concise statement of your central argument
  • survey of other already published books on your topic
  • summary of the expected audience for your book 

Advice from Publishers:

Other:

Publish Online

Research Networks vs. Social Networks

Academic social networks, or research networks, are similar to social networking sites, but designed for the academic community. These online platforms allow you to develop a profile and connect with other researchers, while also allowing you to share academic-related content. These tools are typically free to use. The most attractive feature of these sites is their offer of a user-friendly way to present your research articles and other scholarly outputs to your colleagues and scholarly communities worldwide.

Research networks are a subset of professional social networks. They have much of the same functionality as professional networks but also offer research-specific tools such as specialist Q&As, data sharing, research sharing, comments, suggested readings, and disciplinary networking. This functionality has had a notable impact on research as it allows geographically diverse researchers to network and discuss specific and niche areas of research. 

These tools provide new forms of research collaboration and dissemination. Some of the research networks are purposefully anti-establishment and were created as opposition to existing publishing techniques. As such, a lot of these websites embrace the principles of open-source publishing and work towards providing unrestricted access to scholarly research. However, unlike true open access sources, they often require users to register for a free account to gain access.

One important tool that most research networks provide is knowledge discovery. While traditional databases allow users to search for articles, research networks feature social curation of papers into themes. It is worth checking these sites as part of your literature searches.

While these websites can be useful tools for researchers, it can be argued that they can be a waste of valuable time if not engaged with correctly. As with all social networks, these websites can be used daily to network or they can be used only when needed. It is therefore the choice of the researcher as to how they engage.

It is also important to consider that all content on these websites and networks is not peer-reviewed (unless it is a shared paper from an academic source such as a journal.) For this reason, researchers must be critical in their use of these tools.

Academia.edu

Academia.edu is a platform for academics to share research papers. The company's mission is to accelerate the world's research. As well as the regular profile and messaging tools, it offers researchers the ability to create sessions asking for comment and critique of their work, follow research interests, comment and access analytics.

ResearchGate.edu

ResearchGate is a social networking site that enables researchers to share papers, ask and answer questions, and find collaborators. As well as the regular profile and messaging tools, it offers researchers the ability to follow research interests, share their data, comment and view access stats. The website features a proprietary metric to measure scientific reputation. It is called the RG Score and it works by analysing how "your research is received by your peers."

Google Scholar

Google Scholar Profiles provide a simple way for authors to showcase their academic publications. You can check who is citing your articles, graph citations over time, and compute several citation metrics. You can also make your profile public, so that it may appear in Google Scholar results when people search for your name.

It's quick to set up and simple to maintain - even if you have written hundreds of articles, and even if your name is shared by several different scholars. You can add groups of related articles, not just one article at a time; and your citation metrics are computed and updated automatically as Google Scholar finds new citations to your work on the web. You can choose to have your list of articles updated automatically or review the updates yourself, or manually update your articles at any time.

Mendeley.com

Mendeley is first and foremost a bibliographic management tool. Alongside the functionality for managing papers and citing them, it also has a series of knowledge discover tools. There are some social tools enabling researchers to develop a profile, specify research interests, share bibliographic information and send messages.

Figshare

Figshare is a repository where users can make all of their research outputs available in a citable, shareable and discoverable manner. Figshare allows users to upload any file format to be made visualisable in the browser so that figures, datasets, media, papers, posters, presentations and filesets can be disseminated in a way that the current scholarly publishing model does not allow.

 

Academic blogs

Blogs are discussion or informational websites that consist of discrete entries ("posts") typically displayed in reverse chronological order. A large number of academics, researchers and doctoral students publish posts to blogs. This makes them a useful source of information and networking (via the comments tool). As blogs can have single or multiple contributors, posts are usually tagged with the authors (user)name.

X (Twitter)
X (formerly known as Twitter) may serve as a useful academic network. Refer to the following pages for guidelines and best practices:

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a business-oriented social network. It is used for professional networking and allows users to present their CVs, formally connect with other users, send messages, and create and join groups. It can serve as a useful academic network. See the guides below for additional information about the value of LinkedIn.

Listserv

A listserv is a method of communicating with a group of people via email. Listservs are known by other names, such as listserve, electronic mailing lists, email discussion groups, private discussion forums, mail groups, online discussion groups, discussion boards, or message boards. 
A common mistake is confusing listservs with mailing lists. While both are used for email communication, they are not interchangeable. A mailing list is a one-way communication tool used to send messages to a large group of people. A listserv is a two-way communication tool that allows for discussion and collaboration among members. People join because they share a common interest such as hobbies, recreation, work, health, and academics. L-Soft is a major platform used to search for listservs.