Kate Caldwell, PhD
Recent Graduate in Disability Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago
Editorial Coordinator for the AAIDD journal Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities
Recent Graduate in Disability Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago
Editorial Coordinator for the AAIDD journal Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities
For the past two and half years, I have been both a graduate student in Disability Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago and the Editorial Coordinator for the journal Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (IDD). This means that often I have students ask for advice on submitting a manuscript to an academic journal. Submitting a manuscript to a journal can be such an intimidating process, largely because the logistics are often not well explained to grad students. This post is an effort to shed light on what goes on behind the scenes and de-mystify the publication process a bit. Hopefully the tips below will be useful to you going forward in your work!
Writing the Manuscript
One thing that we see a lot of when grad students submit manuscripts is
that they are formatted like a student paper or thesis, not necessarily an
article. Many assume that translating a
student paper into an article means shortening their work. There is definitely more to it than that, and
sometimes even seasoned professors can forget this! Student papers are student papers and, while
they may have fulfilled the requirements of the assignment they were submitted
for, they usually don't work for journals and have a difficult time in
review. However, student papers can be a
wonderful starting point for developing a journal article. In doing so you should keep in mind who the
audience is, what your argument is, and how to best convey that argument to the
audience. There has been considerable
dialogue among qualitative methodologists about “letting the research speak for
itself” and the researcher acting as a tool for sharing the voices and
perspectives of the research participants.
However, that does not mean that you, as a researcher, don’t have an
argument and an important voice in the process.
Sometimes it may take awhile to find the right “voice” or approach for a
manuscript, but once you find one that fits, and is representative of what you
want to convey about your data, everything else should come together.
My best tip for writing a manuscript is to look at an article that you liked,
one that stayed with you and made you think, “I want to write like that.” Study that article: look at their outline and
how the author structured their argument; look at how they presented their
methods, data, and findings; look for their objective, purpose, argument, and
the significance of their research; and finally think about what it was about
this article that made you like it. Another
approach is to look at the articles that have been published recently in the journal
you want to submit to for these factors.
Doing so will give you a good idea of what the editors and reviewers expect
in a publishable article. Also, make
sure to read the author instructions and follow the formatting requirements thoroughly
(As a bonus, the editorial assistant will love you for this!).
Finding the Right Journal
Choosing the journal you want to submit to can make or break your
chances of having a manuscript accepted.
It is essential that your manuscript is a good fit with the journal’s
aims and scope as well as the journal’s target audience. If there is a poor fit, then the Editor may choose
to return the manuscript before even putting it through a review. I’ve had this happen to me several times,
particularly with work in areas that are under-researched and exploratory,
where there is no clear fit within existing journals. In those instances, it’s a process of
try-try-again and angling the manuscript differently so that it is more
explicitly relevant to that journal’s audience.
Another factor that can affect your submission is the journal’s
receptivity to graduate student work.
Many journals treat graduate student submissions the same as any other
manuscript, utilizing an anonymous (often referred to using ableist language as
“blind”) peer-review process. However, I
have encountered a couple of journals that disincentivize graduate students by
charging a fee or putting the manuscript through a separate review process that
was not completely anonymous. Definitely check out the journal in advance and
if anything is not clear you can always email the Editor to ask a question or
two.
My best advice here is to look at what the journal has published
recently in terms of both topic and methodology. For instance, some journals choose not to
publish literature reviews whereas others choose not to publish
meta-analyses. Further, some journals
may not have a good history of publishing research that utilizes qualitative
approaches such as focus groups or participatory action research. Or if they have, they may want that
information presented in a very specific way. Looking at what the journal has published
recently will help you get an idea for how to present your own work. If the journal isn’t a good fit, the Editor
will let you know right away and it’s important not to interpret this as a
rejection of your work.
Submitting Your Manuscript
First and foremost, SUBMIT IT! I
know so many people (friends, colleagues, and people I have met at conferences)
who really want to submit their work, but who worry that it is not good enough and
so they never submit it in the first place.
It’s never going to be perfect.
Even after an article is published there will be things you want to
change, and because we are working in a field that is constantly advancing you
should want to! Instead of focusing on what could have been changed or made
better in a published piece think of it this way… that just means you’ll have
an opportunity to write another article that builds upon your previous
work. That said, you do want to submit
the best possible version of your work.
Conversely, some graduate students make the mistake of “shopping” a manuscript
around, wherein they submit an incomplete manuscript to a journal that they
don’t want to publish in so that they can get feedback to improve their
manuscript for submission to a different journal. While it may sound savvy, this will actually end
up working against you. The journal is
going to approach experts in the field to review your piece. These may be future colleagues and employers
so you want to put your best work forward in case you find yourself in a
situation where the work you were talking about with a colleague or in a job
interview sounds a lot like an interesting manuscript they reviewed once. That conversation is going to be a lot
trickier if they had a bad impression of that work. Moreover if a manuscript that is being
shopped makes it past quality control and into review, the author likely isn’t
going to get the kind of feedback they are looking for. Reviewers are volunteering their time and
when they see a manuscript that is unfinished they will more often than not
leave fewer, broader comments to that effect.
However, if you submit the best possible version then they are more
likely to give you more specific and constructive criticism in ways that will
challenge but inevitably strengthen your manuscript and future work.
Okay so now comes the hard part… waiting. On average it will take between 3 to 4 months
for a manuscript to go through review, but in some cases it may take up to a
year. What is going on behind the scenes
while you’re waiting? The Editor and
editorial staff is contacting potential reviewers and waiting for their
response, contacting additional reviewers as needed (e.g. if one has to
withdraw at the last second due to an emergency or conflict of interest),
following up with reviewers to submit their comments, and then finally the
process of making an editorial decision begins.
This last part can vary depending upon the journal. I once submitted to a journal that convened
the entire editorial board to discuss the manuscript. Including a round of revisions, it took over
a year and a half before they ended up rejecting the article, citing that it
was their policy not to allow another round of revisions. We ended up submitting the manuscript to a
different journal that was a better fit for the material, but even so that
submission took another year to get through review. So yeah.
Waiting. Ugh. The best advice I got there was from my
advisor (and a cheesy infomercial), “set it and forget it.” Submit your manuscript and then move on to
the next one.
The Decision, Revisions &
Responding to Reviewers
Generally, there are four types of decisions that you will get on a
manuscript: accept, accept pending revisions, revise and resubmit (R&R),
and do not accept. No one ever gets
their manuscript accepted the first time around and very few ever see an
“accept pending revisions.” The majority
of decisions are to “revise and resubmit.”
This is true even for senior researchers so know that you are in good
company! Also, I see a lot of authors
(grad students and professors alike) who assume that an R&R is a rejection
and never resubmit or submit their manuscript to a different journal. However, in my experience, it has been
worthwhile to make the revisions and resubmit to the same journal. Be persistent. Remember that an editor will not tell you to revise
and resubmit if they don’t think it is possible to make the changes requested;
otherwise the decision would simply have been “do not accept.” There are two
kinds of revisions that will be asked for: major or minor revisions. If your decision is an R&R with minor
revisions then you are in a good position!
Major revisions, on the other hand, are always hard and typically
require some restructuring. In one
instance, I had to cut down the number of words in a manuscript by half while
trying not to lose any content. That was
a challenge. If you receive an R&R
with major revisions and don’t feel it is going to be possible to make the
changes requested then consider talking to the editor about your concerns.
With regards to revising - Don’t fight it. Try to make as many of the
revisions as possible, and remember that the reviewers are experts in the field. The Editor has passed along their feedback
for a reason. You may not be able to
make all of the suggested changes, and that is okay! There may be other ways for addressing
reviewers’ concerns by presenting, framing, contextualizing, or structuring the
information differently. Moreover, if it
sounds like a reviewer just “isn’t getting it” or missed the point completely…
they did. This just means that point
needs to be clarified or made more explicit in the manuscript. Every time that I have responded to reviewer
comments there have been one or two points where I had to give a justification
for why a change was not made. Don’t
compromise your principles or your research because you feel pressure to
respond to a reviewer comment. Explain
instead your well-reasoned justification for not making that change. For example, I once received a comment from a
reviewer whose specialty was not intellectual disability. This reviewer argued that the AAIDD definition
for intellectual disability that I was using was not sufficient and offered their
own scale, suggesting that I use the terminology “mental retardation.” I thanked the reviewer for highlighting the
need to clarify the operational definition and took the opportunity to better
explain the recent advancements in terminology (See Rosa’s
Law). Finally, I suggested that a
more thorough conversation about this topic was worthwhile, but outside the scope
of the current research. It is really
important to be polite and to thank the reviewers for volunteering their time
to read and respond to the manuscript. For
me this is easier said than done. I have had to learn to read the reviewer
comments, step away from the manuscript, vent my frustration, and then
re-approach it later when I can be calm and measured in my response. My best piece of advice here is to draft the
response letter and then go through and remove all of the adjectives!
Seriously, it helps.
I sincerely hope that you all find this useful in moving forward with
your work. Graduate students and early
career professionals have the potential to serve as a source of innovation in
moving the field forward and advancing knowledge in intellectual and
developmental disability research by providing new insights and perspectives on
contemporary issues.
3 comments:
Kate, What a great article! This has (re)inspired me to go back and look at my graduate thesis again. My advisers and a co-worker encouraged me to submit it for publication, but the whole process felt daunting. (Plus, I am employed full time at a health department and my career isn't dependent on publication). Your article is well written and elucidated many of the ins and outs of the publication process. Thank you!!
Thanks for this article. I will keep it bookmarked to come back to when I submit manuscripts.
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