2. • Inside the ‘black box’
• Framing your article
• On writing
3. Have you submitted an article for
publication?
Do you edit or peer review already?
You might enjoy this Scholarly Kitchen article if so.
4. Inside the ‘black box’
Managing editor:
Cathie Jackson
Book review editor:
Ian Hunter
5. Articles should be …
• Research-informed and evidence-based
• Designed around an arguable research question
• Contextualised with reference to previous and current advances in
IL thinking
• Methodologically robust with a demonstrable research design
Publication criteria
6. • Relevance to the journal’s remit
• Originality and interest to our audience
• Title and abstract
• Approach and method
• Use of literature and referencing
• Clarity of expression and structure
Peer review criteria
7. • Relevance to the journal’s remit – research- or practice-based
investigations into information literacy
• Originality and interest to our audience - useful contribution to
knowledge or good practice?
• Title and abstract – appropriate wording and length and informative?
• Approach and method – appropriate? rigorous?
• Use of literature and referencing – good analysis of literature?
Good referencing or signs of plagiarism?
• Clarity of expression and structure – clear exposition of
argument? Logical structure? Spell out acronyms, avoid jargon!
Peer review criteria
8. Accept for publication without amendment - almost never!
Revisions required
Major revisions required followed by peer review
Resubmit elsewhere
Decline submission
Reviewer recommendations
10. • Make a list of all the actions needed of you
• If you can’t meet them, discuss this with the editors
• Revise the paper and resubmit it
• If there were comments you didn’t address, because you couldn’t
or because you disagreed with them, say why
• Remember that addressing these comments may unearth other
suggested changes – several rounds of revisions may be required
What to do with reviewer comments
11. • Make a list of all the actions needed of you
Can you address them? If so, how?
• If you can’t meet them, discuss this with the editors
Tell us why (you can take your article elsewhere!)
• Revise the paper and resubmit it
with a covering letter detailing how you have addressed each
comment
You might also like this Storify.
What to do with reviewer comments
12. • ‘Resubmit’ doesn’t mean ‘Reject’
It’s been known for authors to react as though they’re the same thing
• Journals have a specific scope and remit
If your article doesn’t fit, our container is the wrong shape!
• We are writers too
… and we know it sucks to have your writing criticised
Remember …
13. Feedback should be constructive,
comprehensive and courteous ...
The role of peer reviewer is a privileged
one and must be undertaken with empathy
and integrity.
JIL Author Guidelines
14. “help[ed] to make a potentially very scary process a lot more
manageable.”
“The author would like to thank …the reviewers, whose
comments were invaluable.”
Reviewing the reviewers
15. “I would like to thank you again for all the constructive and
benevolent effort that you and your reviewers put into this
review and for the graciousness with which you did it. I have
been through several submission processes that have been quite
impersonal and where the critical feedback has been either on
the verge of cruelty or entirely neglectful. You and your
reviewers stand apart …”
Reviewing the reviewers
17. JIL Copyeditors’ advice
• Use the publication template if there is one
• Define acronyms and abbreviations on first use
• Format your references using the journal’s house style
• Ensure all in-text citations are given a full reference at the end,
and that all references are cited in the text
• Ensure diagrams and images are copyright-cleared and/or
attributed
18. Tweet by Academia Obscura reproduced with permission
Image source unknown (reddit meme)
19. Once it is published
• Add it to your institutional repository if publisher permits
• Tell the world - use the DOI where possible
28. Tell your reader …
• Context - you’re contributing to a dialogue
• Approach and method that underpin the research
• Rigour - the validity of your approach and findings
• What/why/how of your research
30. What/why/how
• What is your research?
What questions does it address (or ask)?
• Why are you doing it?
Why does it matter? What will it change?
What interests/frustrates/niggles you about the topic?
• How are you doing it?
What’s your approach or method? How does it frame your findings?
How does it help you mitigate bias?
34. • Keep focused
Pin your hypothesis or question and your what/why/how analysis by
your desk.
Everything you write is directed towards answering the question.
• Flatpack it
Dive in wherever you feel you have something to say.
Write up the section which comes most naturally and compile the
sections later.
35. • It’s iterative
Draft, redraft, draft again (and see Lamott on first drafts!)
• Find (or bribe) a proofreader
This could be a colleague, friend or family member, but always get
someone else to read it through!
• Read critically to help you write critically
Become a reviewer – or ‘buddy up’ with another aspiring author and
support each other
36. • Free-writing
Don’t wait until you know what you want to say – get ideas out of
your head so you can reflect on and develop them
• Join (or start) a writers’ group
You can read why I love them in this blog post.
• Break it down
It’s like eating an elephant!
How did you find the experience?
Most people would say: slow! and rather involved! Stories of epic review times – months, years … It can feel as though you send your piece off and it goes into a black box (or maybe a black hole) and even when it emerges at the other end you still don’t really know what has happened inside that box.
It can also be functionally – as well as creatively – challenging:
“In order to finalize my submission, I had to negotiate a misleading and counterintuitive third-party platform; read and try to absorb several pages of arcane (and sometimes self- contradictory) format guidelines; categorize my article according to a rubric that did not make sense; follow an uploading process that left me, at several points, unsure of whether I would have the opportunity to include essential figures.
“Never has the word “submission” seemed so bitterly apt as it did during this process.”
(http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2015/06/15/the-manuscript-submission-mess-brief-notes-from-a-grumpy-author/)
At JIL, as with all journals, all articles submitted are scanned by a human : ) A number of articles are declined at this first stage, usually on the grounds that they’re out of scope – for JIL this would mean not about information literacy – so one of the most useful things you can do when deciding to submit is check the scope of the journal and what it’s for.
This is quite a broad-brush proceeding. If the paper is written (broadly) in an appropriately scholarly way and doesn’t fall outside our scope, we’ll assign it two peer reviewers.
Sneak preview into our new author guidelines!
Grounds on which I will decline: ethical unsoundness; (total) lack of methodological rigour.
Even a lack of connection between data and conclusions may be salvageable, but if the research project itself has been designed unsoundly (or hasn’t been designed at all) there’s little I can do to salvage it. The moral of the story is: ensure you have a robust research design : )
This is what we ask our reviewers to look for and weigh up. These criteria will be similar for other journals.
Here’s a bit more about what the JIL peer reviewers look for – how these criteria get used in our context …
The reviewers get 3 weeks to look at the work – and that’s assuming that the first two reviewers we’ve approached are able to review it! Pressure of work and the fact that all of this happens through goodwill, unpaid, and extra to the day job in our case, is what often leads to delays in getting back to authors.
I get the original article plus the peer reviewers’ reports and recommendations (plus any future rewrites, which may come to me first or may have a further two reviews attached). Generally reviewers will want some revisions – these are often clarifications, but can sometimes be larger, conceptual-level changes. But I pick out and balance the most salient points from both (or all) the reviews so that the author gets a clearly structured message about what needs doing.
I also review the reviews … and the reviewers! OJS allows me to rate them.
Again, I try to do what it takes to keep papers in – to bring them up to publication standard – rather than to put them out. This can feel like being a critical friend, or sometimes a proofreader-for-sense-and-clarity; sometimes it can feel like being a mentor. But there is almost always something worth publishing in every paper. If JIL isn’t the right place I’ll try to suggest where might be.
It’s emotive. We do know that.
Storify: https://storify.com/explorstyle/acwri-twitter-chat-dealing-with-reviewer-comments
Further author advice: “Embrace the criticism - give yourself a day or two to get over the "ow!" factor, then go back in a more reflective frame of mind”
At JIL we will always try to point up what we like and think works as well as what we think needs work.
At JIL we will always try to point up what we like and think works as well as what we think needs work.
Once accepted, the paper is passed to copyediting … they are also very human : )
And then the copyeds might come back and bother you – unless you’ve gone for some easy wins from the start!
The main issue is to follow the journal guidelines – format your paper in the way that you are asked (it’s like being a student all over again …)
A DOI is a perma-link that will always allow people to find your article (unlike a URL) and it’s linked with aggregation services like Scopus which are starting to display alt-metrics.
Thinking about impact and metrics …
The choice around open access can be a difficult one. ECRs have their way and their name to make; impact matters; and openness is a variable concept – it’s different in different disciplines.
Ultimately the choice is yours – unless you’re RC funded : ) Be aware of your options, and also fo the impact of all of our choices on the scholarly ecosystem
But what does it all feel like from the inside?
What could YOU publish, where will you take it, and how will it feel?
Let’s think about what a journal article IS and what it’s for.
It’s a particular kind of communication container and it has certain characteristics.
How is an article different – in feel, in purpose, as a read – from other kinds of publication … such as a doctoral thesis?
It’s a smaller container – it’s still a contribution to or advancement in knowledge but it may be a modest one: another brick in the wall!
Articles generally focus on a single topic of concern and look at it in a detailed way – like a laser beam or a spotlight.
Other differences pointed out in the blog post by Pat Thomson:
fewer ideas dealt with (one or maybe two), and fewer major points made (three or four)
a synthesis of research literature, not a review
far fewer references – only those dealing directly with the paper’s theme
theory used sparingly and explained in your own words
fewer citations in the text – you can shortcut the ‘audit trail’
So it probably won’t work to simply try to compress your thesis into an article! They are different containers and different kinds of beast.
Likewise, it may or may not work well to think about publishing a chapter. Chapters aren’t designed to stand alone but to explore deeply within an established context. Your article needs to provide its own context and to have its own internal consistency.
Going back to the previous metaphor, if your article is a brick in a wall – a contribution to a larger structure – that structure isn’t your thesis. It’s the scholarly dialogue in your subject. What (or what else) do you have to say that responds to and advances that dialogue?
Having said all that - in practical terms there are aspects of your thesis work that you can publish with less fiddling and recasting than others!
What might they be?
Beloved darlings = the pieces of writing that don’t make the cut to your thesis because they don’t fit the final shape of your argument – but they are good pieces of writing and you care about them!
Take a few moments to think about aspects of your research that could stand alone; that would contribut to the dialogue; themes or topics you could explore in more depth or in a different context… ? Discuss in pairs (actively listen and feed back if there’s time). Take some time to make a note of what you’ve come up with.
A messy, challenging and emotive subject!
Not made easier by the fact that you have two aspects to think about: the shape, construction and persuasiveness of the finished product – which is often what people mean when they talk about writing (that nice, linear, articulate piece of work) – and the far more elusive and very messy process that gets you there. Which is not at all linear and often doesn’t feel very articulate.
Let’s look at the product to start with …
The same principles apply to this ‘container’ as to other scholarly communications – like theses : ) These issues need to be addressed explicitly in a peer-reviewed article. They are part of the criteria that peer reviewers work to.
Context: ensure you refer to the literature and place the work within a wider context. This helps your readers situate it with reference to their own knowledge and experience of the field, and it also helps to signal what you’ve done that’s different or new – your own contribution.
Approach and method: this is so much more than choosing a scientific-sounding methodological label! How you approach your question, the framework you choose to work within, and how you design your data collection instrument, are what ensure the validity and integrity of your work. Get a guide book for your chosen method and use it as a tool to underpin your whole research process as well as the write-up.
Rigour: You should also back up any claims you make with appropriate evidence (otherwise it’s just your opinion!). Some of this will come from the literature/the research context; some from your data. Bear in mind that your claims need to be proportionate to your findings : )
A handy framework for bridging the gap between product and process! These questions are useful in two ways:
1. In the finished article, for situating the research in its context and signposting what the article’s contribution is; but also,
2. In your own thinking and writing process, so you can be clear about the ‘big picture’ of what you’re doing.
And each answer – or set of answers – feeds in directly to the major conventional sections in an article:
The ‘what’ will inform your introduction
the ‘why’ will, too, and will also help you to choose which parts of the literature to use to contextualise your work
the ‘how’ is crucial for your methods section.
This very simple framework can help your thinking and writing, as well as help structure your finished piece of work. You can expand the questions if you want to …
Take a moment to reflect on the potential piece you described to someone earlier – could you answer these questions about it? Do they illuminate it or help situate it at all?
Whatever else – don’t lose sight of your passion!
Tips for helping with the process mess – to help you get writing and keep writing (and stay on top of it)
It’s important – but hard – to keep focused on the ‘big picture’ (the research question or hypothesis) while you do the minutiae – the small-scale, step-by-step stuff.
These are (word-for-word) the advice we also give to aspiring article writers.
It’s really important to get your ideas out of your head and onto paper – you have to get past those first drafts! Writing is a form of thinking: you don’t have to commit yourself to every word you write down; you can ‘try on’ different standpoints.
https://librariangoddess.wordpress.com/2011/12/15/dont-get-it-right-just-get-it-written/
Three great sources of real-world help about writing.
