The process of submitting to and hopefully being published in an academic journal can be opaque. Every journal has it’s own rules; different editors communicate (or don’t) differently; and the advice that you receive from different academic advisors might be vague or conflicting. If you’ve been given some hard and fast rules for how-to and how-not-to get published (and they’ve been working for you), great! Keep doing that. However, if you’re feeling a bit uncertain about the process, or if you just want a better sense of what you can do to prep as an author, take a look at this.
Although it might seem pedantic, I think it makes sense to first look at what happens to a paper when you submit it. You probably already have a good sense of the process: you send something in, it gets reviewed, if it is accepted you make whatever changes you need to, and it goes on your CV. That’s fair. But, having a more precise understanding of this process can give you some insight into how/why/when editors make the decisions that they do– understanding How Things Work will give you more opportunities as an author to make things work in your favor.
Here’s an overview of the process that takes place after you submit your paper to a journal. I’ve tried to include some practical piece of advice that you can glean from each step:
First a note about the timeline
The whole process (from submission to publication–or just from submission to decision) can take a long time. It is considered very quick to hear an update about a submission within two months of submitting it. I’ve heard of journals being like 18 months behind on submissions. This is a pain because you can/should only submit an article to one journal at a time (this is different than when you are shopping a book around).
Why this matters: If you want to submit your article to another journal but you haven’t received a decision yet from the journal that currently has your article, reach out to the editor. You can always ask to remove your article from consideration, freeing you up to submit it elsewhere.
Step one: The “desk read”
The editor (or, if it is a larger journal, the editorial staff) takes a look at your submission. This is a first pass where they can determine whether or not your paper “is right” for the journal. If it is, they send it out for review. Some editors read very closely, others skim and spot check for things they think are important. If the staff decides not to send your paper out for review, you will receive a “desk rejection.”
Why this matters: One helpful (albeit counterintuitive) way of thinking about how to get published is to imagine all the ways and places that a journal can decide that they won’t publish your work. If a journal gets a lot of submissions (probably the largest, most prestigious journals in your field) then they will be more liberal with rejections; they’ll reject papers for pettier reasons than a journal that has to be more conservative with rejections. The desk read is where a lot of these judgement calls are made. During a desk read, an editorial staff will be asking themselves the following:
- FIT: Does this paper “belong” in this journal? Does it speak to the issues that this journal’s readership cares about? Does it belong somewhere else?
- ARGUMENT: If this is a research article, is the argument/contribution that the author is trying to make clear? Does it make an argument at all?
- CLARITY: Is this paper well written? Are there pervasive grammatical mistakes? Is it hard to understand?
- RULES: Does this paper follow the submission guidelines that this journal has specified (blinding, formatting, citations, length, etc.)?
Small journals (those that may be eager to accept submissions) are more likely to consider these things in the following order: FIT is more important than ARGUMENT is more important than CLARITY is more important than following the RULES. Of course, there are exceptions, but if an eager journal thinks the piece that you’ve written is a good fit and makes some kind of plausible argument, then they might let you slide on some clarity or formatting issues in order to send it out to reviewers.
On the other hand, if a journal gets so many submissions that they need to use any means necessary to weed the field down, they’ll probably look to see if you’ve followed the RULES first–then issues of FIT, ARGUMENT, and CLARITY will come into play.
Regardless, for all journals–small, large; prestigious, lesser-known–be sure to take a look at both the Author Guidelines and the Mission Statement or Aims and Scope that is published on their websites. This will help you better understand what rules you have to follow when you submit, and whether your paper will be welcome (or whether you should find a different publication).
Step 2: Finding peer reviewers
If your paper makes it past a desk read, it will be sent out for review (probably–as long as it is a peer-reviewed journal). First, the editorial staff will determine who should review it. You may have some say in this: some journals allow you to specify who you think would be a good reviewer as well as anyone that you really don’t want involved.
Why this matters: It can be really difficult to find a good reviewer for an article. A lot of material is hyper-specific, some sub-fields and disciplines are pretty close knit, and most importantly, being a reviewer for a journal is unpaid labor (especially if you’re contingent), so most review-requests go unanswered. If the journal allows you to recommend potential reviewers, consider both those who have expertise in your area and those who have some broad interest in the field that would make them a good general reader. Unless they’ve got a clear reason not to, it is likely that the editorial staff will reach out to at least one of the people you specify.
If an editor is really struggling to find reviewers, they might send it out to the journal’s Editorial Board (some journals might go to the EB first–whatever the house rules are). This means that you can have a good idea of who might review your work–obviously a lot of hedging in that sentence. Regardless, consider checking out who is on the journal’s editorial staff. Is there anyone there who writes on your subject? If so, have you cited them or addressed their work at all?
Step 3: Peer review
When your paper is sent out (usually two reviewers; sometimes one plus the editor if the journal is small), the reviewers will most likely not know who you are. Most journals run a double-blind process, so you will remain anonymous to them and they will remain anonymous to you. Their job is to both give feedback on the submission, itself, and to give general comments to the editor about whether the submission should be published. There are basically three possible outcomes: Reject, Accept with Major Revisions, Accept with Minor Revisions. In the case of two reviewers who feel wildly different about a submission, the editor might find another reviewer or they might step in, themselves, as a tie breaker.
Why this matters: While the purpose of the desk read was to assess the viability of your submission in the broadest terms (e.g. whether it fit the journal), the purpose of the peer review is to evaluate your work in more detail. Here, reviewers will be critiquing your argument, your methodology, whether you’ve looked at the correct literature, whether you’ve demonstrated that your work is important, whether your work is cutting edge enough, whether it fits in with what is established in the field, and so on.
To be honest, it can be kind of a crapshoot. It isn’t uncommon to receive conflicting critique from both reviewers (“Doesn’t engage enough with existing scholarship…” & “Reads too much like a literature review…”), and sometimes you’ll just run into a reviewer who wishes that you had written the paper that they wanted to read. Nothing to be done about that.
The best way to make sure that your submission will pass peer review is, unsurprisingly, to discuss your work with your peers and your mentors before sending it in. What kinds of feedback and criticism can they give you? Absent that, be sure that your paper answers the following questions and provides adequate justification for those answers:
- What is the research question you are asking and why is it important to answer?
- What has prior scholarship said about this question/topic, and how will your work contribute to this conversation (i.e. what research gap are you filling)?
- How will you answer your research question and why did you choose this method?
- What did you find?
- How should your findings be interpreted?
- Why does any of this matter?
Even if you are writing a more humanities-leaning paper, the answer to these questions should be clear to anyone reading your work–you probably just won’t have discrete sections for each of these things.
Step 4: Revisions
Assuming that your work is accepted, it is now your job to make whatever revisions have been specified by the reviewers and the editors. In the same way that your reviews might be somewhat incompatible, it might seem difficult to do everything that is asked of you. Often, editors will ask that you explain (either in the margins or in a separate document) how you have/haven’t done what was requested of you.
Why this matters: Editors know that reviewers can be difficult. In many cases, the feedback that you receive has already been filtered by the editor to save you from the nonsense. At the same time, most editors give broad discretion to their reviewers–that’s the point of peer review. As an author, you have to balance this.
Try to separate the feedback you receive into different categories–maybe according to whether it has to be done (MUST DO, WILL DO, WILL PROBABLY DO, DON’T WANT TO) or according to how painful it will be to do it (HARD, TIME CONSUMING BUT NOT HARD, MEH, EASY). When you explain to the editor why you have (or haven’t) made the changes that you have, be detailed. Editors will give a lot more latitude to issues that are centered in some disciplinary debate rather than issues that most in your field would considered settled. Also, if you are having trouble figuring out how to respond to a reviewer’s comments, consider reaching out to the editor.
Step 5: Onto publication
Depending on the journal and the extent of the revisions that were requested of you, your paper might go through another round of peer review. For many journals, though, the editor will just check to make sure that they are satisfied. After this point, it’s all mechanics. During the final editing and proofing stage, the editorial staff will make sure that your work fits the house style and that you have the appropriate permissions for any images. If any of their changes are serious enough to merit your input, you’ll be asked to fix them yourself, otherwise you’ll probably just get a finished proof to look at before the editor gives it final approval.
Why this matters: To be honest, for the purposes of this guide, it doesn’t! You’re being published–who cares if they want you to include city names in your reference section or not. That being said, there are some things worth noting:
Many journals will publish your piece online before it goes to print. Often months (up to a year or two) before it makes it to print. This gives people who are on a tenure clock a better chance of getting their publications in on time, and (ideally) lets more people access your work. If your work is published online and you notice that there’s something wrong–errors do happen–be sure to reach out to the editor as quickly as possible.