Three Tips to Getting Published as a Young Academic

It is always challenging to be at the beginning of your career—young academics often feel like they have a great deal that they need to prove. In fact, many of your mentors, teachers, and in some cases “now-colleagues” have already established their own reputations.

Publish or perish, as the saying goes. It is critical for you to contribute to the academic world so that you can start to make an impact on your field. Right?

Getting published means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, even in the world of academic publishing. For some, this might mean a conference paper. For others, it might mean a full-length book or monograph. Yet, for the majority of people it means to getting research published in a reputable academic journal of some kind. Even “which journal” can be a complicated question as well (and we’ll touch on this shortly).

Here, we’re going to go over three different tips to help young academics to get published. As with most things, these aren’t silver bullets. They are best practices that can help you to make informed and logical decisions to start to navigate the publishing world to help your career.

Why academic publishing matters

It goes without saying that academic publishing is a critical part of the academic space as a whole. The research that gets published in journals and books help to inform and grow research spaces. In 1675, Sir Isaac Newton said that “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”—the work that preceded his own was critical to his own success.

In addition to the vast contributions that research makes to any given field. the cumulative nature of science and research means that today’s results are tomorrow’s breakthroughs.

At a personal level though, academic publishing contributes to the career of an academic in many ways. For example, getting research published can directly impact your career through your ability to get specific jobs or grants from institutions. Getting tenure often relies on (though not exclusively) a strong publishing history. The academic world is very challenging, and getting tenured isn’t easy. Young academics are at a disadvantage in this sense because they don’t often have extensive publishing histories.

To help, here are three tips to keep in mind:

Know the academic publishing landscape for your field;
Figure out where you want to get published;
Target and focus on the goal.

Let’s touch on these all in a bit more detail.

Understanding the academic publishing landscape as a young academic

There’s a good chance that, as a young academic, you’ve heard certain journal names over the years. Perhaps you’ve read articles from those journals in your own career. Debatably, one of the most famous academic journals in the world is Nature—and for some people, getting published in this journal is a professional goal for them. But getting published in this journal is immensely challenging, even for seasoned academics.

Aside from the different journals, there are different types of journals. Do you want to be published in a traditional journal or do you want to pursue open access publishing? Unlike open access publications, traditionally published articles can be gated behind paywalls. But publishing in open access can incur a cost to the authors (usually paid for by the funds that also paid for the research). While institutions are usually the ones that pay the article processing costs associated with open access, there are still questions of reputation that come up. It is worth noting that open access publishing has been around for decades and that not all concerns are valid at this point.

Needless to say, there are many elements to academic publishing, and while some might be news to you, they might not all matter.

Still, this is part of your journey. Learn about the different types of publishing (and the different types of open access as well) and see if this matters to you in your publishing journey.

What does your academic field look like?

Not all academic fields look the same. In fact, because of the wide range of resources allocated to different fields, they might be very different. From the money available to a department, to the costs associated with open access publishing, the dollar value can vary greatly.

Generally speaking, highly competitive fields (biology, robotics, and other similar “hard sciences”) tend to have quite a few resources. The humanities, however, tend to have less. This also is reflected in the cost to publish in open access, where publishing a humanities research paper might cost five times less than a science paper. Learn about your field and understand the landscape. In particular, you might want to consider what differences exist to better understand how they matter to journal publishers.

Which are the big journals? Which are the ones you should avoid? By understanding which are competitive journals for you to consider, you can start looking at our next tip.

Figure out where to get published

Getting published in the academic publishing world can take a bit of time. But, now that you understand the landscape a little bit more, you can start to narrow down your options.

Prof. Mauro Giudici, in an article about considerations for writing and submitting manuscripts makes the following recommendations:

1) Checking the aims and scope of the journal;
2) Assessing the quality of the journal, based not only on the bibliometric indicators, but also on the quality of the published papers and the international recognition of the editorial board;
3) Performing a sincere and genuine assessment of the innovative content of the work to be submitted;
4) Checking the types of papers that are published by the journal.

As we noted above, understanding the landscape matters, but the journals themselves matter as well. Are they a good fit for your article? On the one hand, you want to make sure that your article matches because you want it to get accepted, but a journal that will take any article (even if they don’t match the scope well) might be a journal to consider avoiding.

Target and focus on the goal

Now that you’ve selected your ideal journals, you need to get more specific. Look at the journal submission requirements. Examine what expectations are placed on you as the author of an article. Do you need to do editing on the research or will that be covered later? Will submitting using a template provided by the journal increase your odds of acceptance (which is different from getting published)? Many journals have submission guidelines. These guidelines may have “red lines” in them, which can eliminate your manuscript from consideration regardless of the content or quality of your work. Learning a little bit about what these types of guidelines are to increase your chances of success.

Another tool to consider would be a lay summary. While these are not mandatory for many journals, having one might help an editor to understand the importance and value of your work.

Finally, one of the most important things to do is to keep focused. Rejection doesn’t mean that your research is not valuable. In fact, many rejections have nothing to do with the actual research itself. This is why it is important to have a list of potential journals to submit to.

Stay focused. Keep at it. At the end of the day, you’ll be successful if you put in the effort.