Writing academic articles for publication and developing your academic profile

This chapter addresses the writing of academic journal papers for publication, as developing a profile through a body of written work is part of developing a career pathway to professorship. Part of building your profile involves writing different types of publications, from practitioner informed articles through to double-blind peer reviewed academic journal papers. The latter maintains the highest academic prestige due to the quality assurance process of having a minimum of two reviewer's assess the quality of the paper. The review is undertaken anonymously in order to minimise any bias with respect to reviewers knowing the author. Professors usually are on editorial boards of journals and have experience reviewing papers for publication.

The chapter outlines the different stages of this process and systematically covers; designing research for publication, planning the paper, constructing the paper, checking and submitting the paper and revising the paper; each of which forms a separate phase. Each stage requires you to dedicate time to undertake the work, and that can be challenging with respect to your academic workload. Writing will be on top of an academic’s day job with respect to planning and delivering teaching, conducting research and completing administration associated with each of these roles.

Given that peer reviewed journal articles are considered to be the gold standard in academia, this chapter focuses on how to write papers for journal publication and the guidance outlined in this chapter assumes that your writing is for a journal paper based on research, development or evaluation that you are involved in. Whilst material based on undertaking literature reviews or purely theoretical developments does get published in refereed journals, those types of papers are not reporting on original empirical research. That said, it's worth pointing out that such papers, like systematic reviews, can be undertaken without funding and can draw on previous work undertaken for one’s doctoral thesis in particular drawing on the literature review chapter.

OBJECTIVES This chapter introduces you to: · Designing research for publication · Planning a paper · Which Journal? Choosing where to submit your paper · Author guidelines · Constructing a paper · Checking and submitting a paper · The editorial peer reviewing process · Revising the paper · Reviewing journal articles and joining an editorial board · Starting a new journal