Month: September 2023

Tips From the Editors

In the last few weeks, we have explained a few key pieces of advice that our editorial team thought would be helpful for prospective authors. This week, we will highlight a couple more suggestions from our team.

Tip #3: Don’t Bury the Lede

Tell the reader why your work is important! Associate Editor Gwen Arnold pointed out, “Authors, myself included, often write initial drafts similar to how they might tell a story, building a narrative arc and reaching a climax and then a resolution that delivers a moral or message.” She goes on to explain that this approach can cause authors to explain the most important aspects of their work later in the paper. Instead, make it clear to readers why your work is innovative and novel. State the key takeaways of your paper in the abstract, the introduction, the discussion, and then again in the conclusion. Don’t make reviewers, editors, and readers dig around for the lede; make it obvious so that you can grab their attention and keep them reading.

Tip #4: Intellectual Identity

Every journal, researcher, and individual work has what Editor-in-Chief Geoboo Song calls an “intellectual identity.” This includes the questions investigated, the methods used, and the topics and theories of focus. We recommend putting in the effort to make sure your work’s intellectual identity aligns with the journal’s. Read through a journal’s recent publications, social media posts, and website to gain a grasp on its identity. After that, take a look at the editorial team. Try to look through their research to discover their individual identities — after all, they are the ones who make most of the manuscript decisions. Finally, go back over your paper. Does it seem to fit with the collective intellectual identity? Would this journal’s readers be interested in your work? 

Academic publication is a competitive process, especially at journals like PSJ that receive a large volume of submissions. Hopefully, these tips from our editorial team will be of use to you when you are submitting your next paper.

Tips From the Editors

We have previously discussed how authors should engage with the ongoing academic conversation in the journal in which they hope to be published. Our editors pointed out that good papers tend to incorporate and build upon the key questions and developments in the field. Here we address the logistics of manuscript processing.

Tip #2: Pay Attention to the Details

Academic journals get hundreds of submissions every year. Each paper that is submitted must be read and evaluated by a member of the editorial team. Editorial Associate Ben Galloway said, “I think one of the most important things I have learned as a part of the editorial team is the process behind manuscript processing and sorting-specifically.” There are several characteristics of a paper, aside from the quality of the writing and research, that are considered within this process.

Originality is always a top priority. Ensure that your work is your own. Any research from other scholars used in your work should be properly cited. Double-check that quotations and concepts are attributed to their original author and source. The same advice applies when you are referencing your own work!

Also make sure you submit an anonymized version of your paper, and pay attention to the journal’s instructions for authors, including style guidelines and word limit.

Finally, don’t forget the cover letter. Authors may underestimate the impression a well-written cover letter can have on the editorial team. “I always read cover letters very closely,” says Editor-in-Chief Geoboo Song. Use your cover letter as an opportunity to make a strong case for your paper to be published. Explain how your paper fits well in the journal and why your work will be of interest to its readers.

Tips From the Editors

Getting your research published can be a difficult and daunting task. We asked our editorial team to draw on their experiences as editors to offer some advice to scholars. In this ongoing series, we will compile, summarize, and relay our editorial team’s thoughts and observations with the goal of helping prospective authors as they prepare to submit their work for publication.

Tip #1: Engage with the Literature

Several members of our editorial team emphasized the importance of engaging with the existing literature. The works featured in PSJ are theory-driven pieces of policy research that often build upon one another. It is clear that the authors published in PSJ have incorporated the developments and key questions presented in the journal into their own work. It is imperative that researchers ask new questions and supply the community with new ideas; however, one must ensure that the questions and ideas presented fit into the scholarly conversation. As Associate Editor Gwen Arnold put it, “…it has to be a real conversation, not a monologue.”

A quick way to gauge how well you have participated in a journal’s academic conversation is to check your bibliography. For an article to sufficiently engage with the intellectual essence of a given journal, it should reference several works published in said journal. This will, of course, only give you a surface-level evaluation of how well the piece has incorporated the relevant literature. Associate Editor Holly Peterson points out that manuscripts can do a good job at drawing on previous developments and adding to the common themes and topics, but a particularly strong manuscript “builds these themes into the very thinking of the piece, not just in the framing of the research, but in its foundations, conceptualizations, and substantive findings.”

In summary, while drafting your article, consider how well you engage with a journal’s existing literature. Try to make this engagement obvious. Readers should be able to plainly see how your work adds to the ongoing conversation and understand how your research contributes to its progress. “Making the findings of the article clearly connected to ongoing conversations in the journal,” Associate Editor Aaron Smith-Walter says, “is an excellent way to elevate the chances that the piece finds a home in its pages.” Keeping this in mind before submitting your paper can help your work stand out and give it the nudge it may need to be on its way to publication.