Unable to read his handwriting, she went on to teach children in a variety of schools for seventeen years. She returned to university to start her PhD in her forties and has been an academic ever since. | Publishing Articles in Academic Journals 61 written something experimental or unconventional there is little point in sending it to a journal that does not and will not include that kind of writing. 4. Look at the list of editors and the editorial board to see whether the people included do your kind of work or are interested in it. Some journals also publish an annual list of people not on the editorial board who have reviewed papers for them. It s worth looking at this to see what kinds of people are receiving the papers. Don t send a paper to a journal that regularly uses reviewers who might be unsympathetic to your work and or your area. 5. There are a number of practical issues to which you must also pay attention. For instance journals accept articles of different lengths. Some want very short submissions while others are prepared to accept much longer articles. This will be stated in the guidelines for authors inside the back or front cover of the journal and on their web page. Failure to heed these guidelines makes editors very grumpy. 6. Journals have different turn-round times for the refereeing process and lead times for publication when accepted. Sometimes this information appears in the journal itself as a footnote to each paper. There are a number of complex factors that impact on lead times. The vagaries of research quality assessment exercises can mean that there is a rush to publish before the exercise deadlines swamping journals. Sometimes editors seek to cluster papers that they think fit well together. Putting an edition of a journal together can be a complex jigsaw puzzle especially as editors are limited in the number of pages they are allowed to have in each issue. This means that you may be moved up or down the queue depending on the length of your paper as they try to make the most economical use of the space available. If getting your work out within a tight period is crucial to you then you should check out all these issues with the .
