Authoring a PhD
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BOLALAR UCHUN INGLIZ TILI @ASILBEK MUSTAFOQULOV, Ingliz tili grammatikasi
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| Survey responses. Most of the key professional groups in the major countries survey their members each year on how they rate their discipline’s journals. These responses often provide invaluable guidance about which journals are actually being read by academics and students in the different fields. Articles in prestigious journals are quite frequently unreadably dense or too esoteric for most professional readers. Their high level of citations can be sustained at anyone time by a small group of elite academics citing each other but not necessarily being read or followed more widely. Sometimes a cohesive referencing circle of lesser authors can also achieve high (mutual) citation scores. Quality of production. Journals vary greatly in their look and feel. Older journals, and those run by professional bodies, often have a cramped, unattractive appearance. Indeed some P U BL IS HING YOUR RESEARCH 3 misguided editors deliberately cultivate a classical (that is, unreadable) format for their journals, under the illusion that this makes them look more academically respectable. From an author’s point of view this approach is a liability. You want your journal offprints to look prestigious and presentable to appointment and promotion committees fora longtime ahead, not nondescript and old-fashioned within a few years. Other things being equal, it is always best to go for journals that have a stylish and simple modern design and clear, uncluttered layouts, incorporating appropriate amounts of white space around your text. Good handling of equations, graphics, charts and tables is important in the social sciences. All these points of comparison above assume that you are considering publishing in an orthodox journal that essentially sells paper copies as the basis of its subscriptions. Even these journals have responded extensively to the growth of the Internet by expanding their electronic presence. Virtually all titles are available electronically via major contents aggregator sites (like Ingenta or JStor) and some journals also have electronic-only subscriptions. 4 In addition to the paper circulation of journals it maybe worth learning about your possible target journal’s electronic readerships, including the number of times articles were downloaded. Some journals will also publish articles in enhanced form electronically, such as using colourized versions instead of being confined to the black-and-white of the normal print version. Other print titles do advance on publication, putting up forthcoming articles for online access on their Websites as soon as they are accepted, rather than waiting for the relevant journal issue to be printed. This way your article is officially seen as published six months earlier than otherwise, which can be important when you are looking for an academic job. A further way to curtail the acceptance-to-publication delay is to publish in a Web-only journal, which is published electronically but not in print. Such titles are common now in the physical sciences, and they are beginning to spring up too in parts of the humanities and social sciences, especially in areas like information science, informatics and business studies. Where they have become established some refereed Web- only journals are starting to be quite successful and well read. 2 3 AUTHORING AP H D But this is still a developing area, and across most of the humanities and social sciences Web-only articles are not yet seen as full publications. Appreciating what gets published When you have identified the hierarchy of journals in your discipline you next need to consider what material they see as publishable. One kind of insight can be gained from looking at Figure 9.1, which shows an example of the forms for grading papers which many journals send out to their referees. Editors ask reviewers to score the paper they are assessing against seven or eight specific criteria, mainly to help firm up what can otherwise often be rather vague or specific qualitative comments from referees, and to assist editors to compare the strength of different referees feelings. The most-used criteria are: ◆ Originality or novelty of approach. Any material submitted to a journal should be original and not have been published in a journal before. A paper that just replicates many previous papers is less likely to secure acceptance. ◆ Scholarship and accuracy. A paper should accurately and comprehensively summarize the current research literature bearing directly upon its central questions. Incomplete coverage of key material, or partial referencing, or misrepresentations of previous literature, are likely to attract criticisms from referees and to be seen by them as warning signs of deeper intellectual failings. ◆ Quality of writing. Journals want to publish readable material, if they can get any which meets their many other requirements. Obvious grammatical infelicities and a dull overall expository style will often push referees towards rejection. ◆ Research methods used. Journals place a lot of emphasis upon publishing work that uses a self-conscious methodological approach, preferably advancing it in certain respects. A paper which simply expresses your intellectual standpoint in an assertive way, without generating substantial supporting evidence, is unlikely to seem P U BL IS HING YOUR RESEARCH 5 |