Guest Post by Marta Deyrup. Marta’s forthcoming book
Librarian’s Guide to Writing for
Professional Publication,
will be published by ABC-CLIO/Libraries Unlimited in June 2018.Marta
Deyrup is editor of the international peer reviewed Taylor & Francis journal The Journal of Archival Organization. Here she
shares some advice from the journal editor’s perspective.
Advice for New Writers
One of the best ways to develop a research agenda is to
start with a skills inventory. Examine your job responsibilities and ask
yourself whether something you do, such as creating finding aids, working with
new technologies, and instructing students in the use of archival resources can
form the basis of an article or presentation. Take a look at anything you’ve
written for work or in a professional setting, for example, a presentation,
report, or committee findings, and see whether it can be turned into a larger
piece. The same holds true for conference presentations and poster sessions.
Authors
often ask what a journal editor looks for in a submission. Editors of academic journals
are for the most part working professionals like yourselves. They edit
professional and academic journals as a service to the profession. They are
also human beings, who have their own likes and dislikes. If you do a
comparison of the title pages of several peer-reviewed journals you will see
that each one is very different. Of course, part of the reason for this is
because the mission and audience of each journal is different, but it is also
true that editors put their own stamp on a journal. Try testing this out
yourself. Look at the table of contents of
journals you are familiar with. Are there any patterns that emerge?
An
editor also asks himself a number of questions before deciding to run an
article that are purely mechanical. This makes sense for a number of reasons.
If an editor of a journal that focuses on digital preservation receives an
article on the “teaching library” s/he will most likely reject it out of hand,
no matter how well it is written. If an
editor for a top-tier, academic journal receives an article that is only four
pages long, s/he will send it back. Editors also want a variety or mix in the
articles they run. If an article is too similar to one just published, the
editor will reject it.
An
editor also will ask the following questions that are specific to an author’s
work: Has the author satisfied the premise established in the lead paragraph of
the article? If the author uses statistics, have these statistics been
interpreted correctly? If the author has conducted a survey, are the results
meaningful? If the author has done a literature review, is it adequate? Has the
right citation style been used? Most importantly, an editor will consider whether
an article needs revision. If there is too much work involved, the editor may
simply return the manuscript to the author without comment. An editor, however,
will work with a writer to improve a piece if it shows promise. If the author
has submitted an article to a peer-reviewed journal, s/he will receive feedback
from the individuals who have reviewed his work anonymously. If the reviewers accept a work with “minor
revisions” an author often only needs to satisfy the reviewers’ questions for
his work to be published. Even if the
reviewers indicate that the article needs “major revisions” the author will
still have an opportunity to resubmit his manuscript.
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