Journal Article Assistance

Okay, so you’ve just finished your dissertation or thesis, or perhaps you’re very done with it and long ago embarked on your post-doctoral career. In either case, journal publication is a logical next step — it’s something you can do throughout your career after the dissertation or thesis, and is a great way of helping to accomplish your goals:

And here they are! You can build your CV and develop your reputation and credibility as a scholar. It is also of course the best way to disseminate your dissertation findings so that they can be employed to help support other researchers and practitioners in your field of study. I mean, all that hard work to carry out the perfect study should lead to real results in the world around us. And, publication is a great way to get your work into the public eye and into the ongoing conversations that researchers all over the world are continually having through the sharing of their findings.

Acceptance of your research as suitable for publication in peer-reviewed journals is never a certainty, and indeed there are definitely tricks to increasing the likelihood that your work will be published. As you surely know, the status of research as published in journals with the “peer-reviewed” label is meaningful in terms of the quality this label confers.

The peer review process involves multiple reviewers who are established researchers in the field to which the journal pertains. Their job is to scrutinize all research article manuscripts that are submitted to ensure that only those that meet high scholarly standards will be published. They ensure that all qualitative analysis is rigorous and free from bias, that statistical work is accurate and robust, and that findings are described in nuanced and precise ways.

Having already gone through such a stringent review process for your thesis or dissertation, this should give you an idea of the quality that will be required of your manuscript if you want to stand a chance of being published. In this video I’ll be explaining how to approach this aim in ways that are more likely to result in your study being accepted for publication. Also, I’ll explain what we can offer in terms of help at this last and very exciting step in your graduate research — again even after the dissertation.

Depending on where you are in your career path, you might be looking for help to turn your thesis or dissertation into journal manuscript, and it’s possible, too, that you’ve taken on a different study that you’d like to develop into something publication-ready. In either case, we can provide assistance, and in one of two ways to start. These are through assisting with journal selection, and with manuscript development. I’ll start by telling you about journal selection and why this is so important to consider.

First, let’s talk about journal selection. Choosing your target journal mindfully is essential for improving the likelihood of obtaining publication and can bring additional prestige to your work based on the journal as well. The most important consideration when selecting a journal is its topical focus. Note that there are many different topics and thrusts on topics that are important for different journals, and that it is important to recognize this when choosing a journal to which to submit your article. In consulting on dissertation-related issues, we’ve been able to familiarize ourselves with many journals that our clients have then been able publish in.

You can learn about the publication priorities for these different peer-reviewed journals through their websites, which typically provide detailed criteria for submission. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of assessing the fit between your topic, and also how you approached your topic, and the submission criteria for any journal you’re interested in publishing in. Even though it’s outside the context of the dissertation, help here can make sure that the alignment here is full and that you’re able to be successful.

Many journals will prioritize only certain types of research, such as action research or case studies within qualitative methodology. And then, others will prioritize a particular stance or sub-discipline within a given field, such as those that only publish studies with social justice or feminist stances. So these end up being the four main considerations when it comes to selecting a journal to target for publication.

As we are one of the only firms — if not the only one — to specialize in qualitative research in addition to quantitative research, we can provide particularly fine-tuned dissertation help when it comes to finding journals that prioritize your own qualitative approach. Again, we also specialize in quantitative research, but are particularly unique in that we specialize in qualitative work, too.

Let’s consider, for example, trying to select a journal in psychology to submit your manuscript to. Within the broad field of psychology there is a large variety of sub-disciplines, and it is essential that your particular study be pitched appropriately for the journal of your choice. Let’s say that you conducted an investigation of social learning dynamics involved in the development of deviant or truant behavior in youths. Because your research used a social psychological approach to understanding these behaviors in youths, it would be most fruitful to consider those journals that also showcase social psychological research. Or, you could select a psychological journal that focuses on research that examines underlying causes of deviant behavior.

However, if you were to submit this research manuscript to a psychological journal that emphasized clinical psychological treatment trials or research into cognitive psychological processes, you would certainly meet with rejection. This is of course extremely discouraging and also a waste of your precious time. There are definitely ways to frame your study so that it is shaped to the publication priorities of desired journals, and this is also an area at this final stage that we can help you with — but, we’ll be talking about in more detail in the next segment. But, ensuring that your work is a topical match for the journal is of the highest importance.

So, let’s also think through journal publication for a study we first examined in the quantitative methodology video, which was about the influence of a peer-mentoring program at a Historically Black College or University, or HBCU, on self-efficacy and resilience. Research questions for the dissertation help to provide focus for potential articles, so let’s break them down again. We can be tailored in our process search for a journal and then in our manuscript development. Here are the research questions that guided the study:

Let’s examine the issue a bit more fully with the study we’ve conducted to answer the research questions here. What’s important to note? First, the research questions refer to a specific context, HBCUs. Next, these questions focus on a specific population, first semester students who are African American. Finally, these questions refer to specific variables of interest, which are peer mentoring, self-efficacy, and resilience. Unpacking these specific elements of your study in this way can help you to determine a journal or journals that might be a great fit for your study. A great way to find your way to such journals, actually, is to find studies that are similar to yours and that have been published.

A database search using the keywords of peer mentoring, resilience, and self-efficacy, turns up a similar study that examined links between resilience and academic self-efficacy for undergraduate students through a rigorous qualitative analysis. We talked about the fine points of database searching in the Literature Review video, if you’d like more detail on this. It was published in Frontiers in Psychology. Because this study is similar to the example we’ve been discussing, this is a clue that this journal might be a good fit for this study.

Moving forward, let’s try to figure out whether our study will mesh with the Frontiers in Psychology mission. On this journal’s website, it reads that this “is the largest journal in its field, publishing rigorously peer-reviewed research across the psychological sciences, from clinical research to cognitive science, from perception to consciousness, from imaging studies to human factors, and from animal cognition to social psychology.” This sounds kinda broad, and although our study might be a good fit for this journal, we might be more successful if we targeted a journal whose editors would find our study more specifically relevant. What would be nice is if we could find a journal that specialized in education — and perhaps higher education — and that focused on issues related to the experiences of students of color, since our study took place at an HBCU.

Let’s dig back in and see if we might find anything more directly relevant. Perhaps we might consider the Journal of Negro Education, which defines its mission as threefold: “first, to stimulate the collection and facilitate the dissemination of facts about the education of Black people; second, to present discussions involving critical appraisals of the proposals and practices relating to the education of Black people; and third, to stimulate and sponsor investigations of issues incident to the education of Black people.” Note how closely this mission matches our study’s focus. Looking through the journal to see what types of articles have been published in it will also provide you with a sense of the fit between our dissertation study and its mission. This is not straightforward work, and talking to a consultant here with publication experience can be invaluable.

Aside from the journal’s mission or focus, another consideration when choosing a journal is impact factor. The impact factor of a peer-reviewed journal is the number of times the average article in a given journal has been cited within the previous year. The impact factor might be considered especially important if you are looking to build a professional reputation through exposure to other researchers in your field, and being able to include lots of publications in high impact factor journals also looks good on your CV. So you can see that I’ve added one final factor — the impact factor — to our list of criteria in selecting a journal.

As you can see, selecting the right journal for your study can be quite the complicated task! Publication of an adapted form of your graduate research is a natural next step in this process, and if you would like to learn more about this post-dissertation phase of help for your study, just give us a call or send an email to ask how we can assist. It is such a thrilling feeling to receive your first acceptance letter from a peer-reviewed journal — and, even if your work is accepted based on the condition that you complete specified revisions, we will include those revisions to our work for free to facilitate your study’s publication!

But, I’m getting a little ahead of myself here. Let’s go back now to your next steps after picking out the perfect journal. Now that you have selected an appropriate journal to target with your manuscript submission, you can move on to manuscript development. We assist many researchers to adapt their work for publication in peer-reviewed journals, including those who are just getting started with a publication career by helping to develop their thesis or dissertation research into manuscripts, and also those who are established researchers who are looking for expert assistance to support their publication efforts in the midst of their extremely busy working lives. Whether you are adapting an existing study for publication or writing up a new study, it is always a great first step to obtain the manuscript style requirements from your target journal’s website.

Every journal has its own manuscript style requirements, which extend through areas like required sections, content required in each section, style requirements for features of the manuscript like citations and references, and length of the manuscript. These can be just as prescribed as guidelines for dissertation editing! Making sure that you are meeting these formatting requirements perfectly will avoid having your work immediately rejected, moving you through to subsequent levels of review within the journal.

Let’s check out the Frontiers in Psychology’s submission guidelines to see what is required. If you have a look at the submission guidelines webpage for this journal, you’ll see that empirical studies have a maximum length of 8,000 words, must contain an abstract of 350 words, and must be single-spaced with line numbers, edited in APA style. Making sure you format your article to these specific requirements will be an absolute requirement if you want your work to receive a more substantive review.

Now, moving ahead, let’s talk about considerations that go beyond formatting. As I was saying a bit earlier, framing your research so that it is consistent with the journal’s topical priorities is a must! You can find statements about the topical priorities of different journals on their websites. So, let’s think about how you might use such information about a journal’s focus to frame your research so that it meshes with the journal’s priorities or mission. Now, if you have conducted a study on how adults with intellectual disabilities experience the relatedness dimension associated with self-determination theory, or SDT, you would probably have a hard time framing that study to meet submission criteria for a journal that prioritized research on business management and leadership.

However, you could find ways to frame this study to mesh with journals that feature research on empowerment and disabilities, which you might do by emphasizing the potential connection between supportive relationships for individuals with intellectual disabilities and the other dimensions of self-determination theory, autonomy and competence. This type of framing would require composing introduction, literature review, and discussion sections so that they emphasize the known connections between the three dimensions of self-determination; this, then, would suitably frame your study as one that has implications for empowerment for persons who experience disabilities.

As we found in the search for a journal, the length will necessarily be a lot shorter — that’s a lot of cutting to do! This need to cut is a practical one, in the sense that each journal issue would be devoted to a single dissertation otherwise! However, it also owes to the fact that, in a journal article, your audience is a lot different. First, it’s a real one! For the dissertation, the audience is mostly pretend — your job is just to convey full understanding of your work and the research context in which it’s situated.

For a journal article, though, you’re writing to share the key findings of your research so that they might be incorporated into future research and integrated into practice in the field. Your thesis and dissertations are also about obtaining and sharing such findings, but a large focus of this graduate research is demonstrating that you have the skills to conduct research in the first place. This is not necessary when publishing your research.

When we set about help to prune and refine the thesis or dissertation to fit within this set of conventions and to apply to this audience, we’ll then need to reduce the length of the literature review and provide a more efficient set of contextual information to ground the study and establish the need for it. We can certainly help with knowing exactly how to prune and refine here, and we’re one of the only consulting firms that specializes in qualitative research! This definitely comes in handy when providing assistance by adapting the dissertation for submission to peer-reviewed journals, because quite a bit of these revisions revolve around the methods and analysis sections.

For example, the comprehensive justification needed for the methodology will be removed for this audience of fellow researchers. This is particularly the case for qualitative research, where the justifications tend to be more philosophical. This pruning process will also remove the many repetitive elements from the dissertation, such as the repeated presentation of the problem, purpose, and research questions, which you might remember from your methods section! Applying all of this to your own dissertation and to turn it into a manuscript can be difficult! Please know that we’re here to support you with this assistance whenever it works best for you!

Also, if you are starting from scratch with your manuscript and are not adapting an existing study for submission, we can help you out from start to finish! This includes assistance with all sections of your research article manuscript — including statistical and qualitative analyses. You can see our other instructional videos on these services if you’d like to learn more about how we can help with these segments of your research. In consulting on this project, just like with the dissertation, we revise at no charge until final approval — if your article is approved with modification, then we can take on the iterative process of revision and until publication.

Seeing your name in ink — actual or digital — is so exciting, and so consider taking it on! Thanks so much!