I often get asked in workshops whether early career researchers should aim to get into a top journal. I want to give the first two parts of my answer in this post.
My first response – WHO IS SAYING THIS IS A GOOD THING, WHY AND WHAT DO THEY KNOW?
Many researchers have been told to do they should go for a ‘top journal’ by their supervisors or mentors. The advice seems to go… well…you’ve finished your PhD, you’ve been told by the examiners you have articles to publish from it, so now you ought to go out and put it into the highest ranked journal in the field. The reasons generally seem to be that this is the right thing to do and that it is good to aim high. (I’m going to address the inadequacy of these as purposes in another post).
On probing, I always discover that a relatively high proportion of the people giving this advice have never themselves been published in these journals. So I have to wonder what’s going on when more experienced researchers are telling the less experienced to do something they themselves don’t do – or haven’t managed to do. I’m sure this advice is given with the best of intentions but the Bourdieuian scholar in me notes that there is supervisory distinction to be gained here … in some institutions, a sign of a good supervisor might be that their supervisee achieves this level of publication… But whatever the logic of the advice, the thing to consider is (1) whether the advice givers know what’s involved and (2) whether they can help.
In essence the first thing that early career researchers need to do if they are told to seek out the top ranked journals is to check out the provenance of the person telling them this is the way to go. If the person has published in these journals, then they are an ‘insider’ and the early career researcher then needs to ask them more about the particular discourse community around the journal, rejection rates, reviewing processes and conventions, turnaround times and so on… If they are an editor, then they are in a position to give a novice writer even more insider knowledge. BUT if the person giving this advice is no more experienced at this kind of publishing than the early career writer, then any advice they give needs to be supplemented quite considerably.
(So if you want to know my provenance at this point, the answer is yes, I have published in top ranked journals in my field and sit on some of these Editorial Boards. However, I never ever choose a journal on the basis of its ranking, something I’ll explain in another post.)
Peer to peer conversations are of course different from supervisor/mentor conversations. Peer to peer conversations about top journal publication are about checking out whether anyone-like-me has gone for a big journal first off, whether it seems possible, and what the experience is like.
I do see this discussion a lot online. The answer that is often given to the question of whether to aim for top ranked journals goes something like – yes why not – go for it, aim high to start with and then go lower if you get rejected.
What is less often talked about even in these peer to peer conversations is that in some citation systems what makes for a high ranking is a VERY HIGH rejection rate. This means that the vast majority of people who submit to the top are ultimately not accepted for publication. A decision to submit to a top ranked journal is usually a decision to enter territory where the odds of getting rejected are relatively high. Getting accepted is a real achievement, but very few actually get there.
So the second answer I give to the question about where to publish is – WHAT’S AT STAKE IN DECIDING TO GO FOR IT.
The conversations about where to publish – between peers and experienced- less experienced writers – ought, in my view, to always consider whether the high odds of rejection are a risk that individuals are prepared to take. The conversations ought to open up the possibility of failure. But even online, the discussions rarely canvass what it’s like to be rejected, particularly when reviewers have been less than kind, and what you do about it.
In workshops I see plenty of people who have been crushed by reviews and then can’t bring themselves to rework the article and submit it somewhere else. They experience a single publication rejection as a rejection of both their scholarship and themselves as scholars. Some don’t recover from this easily. Many need support from mentors and peers in order to do the emotional labour of regrouping and rewriting. Some don’t get this at all and it becomes a problem at work or in getting work.
In my view a critical part of the answer to the question of whether to aim for top ranked journals goes to the question of how resilient the early career researcher actually is, and how secure they are in their identity as a scholar. Anyone who goes for a top ranked journal is running a known risk, and this can be anticipated and thought through beforehand.
Failure to open up discussion of the risks means that we don’t encourage people to ask themselves questions such as:
• How confident do I feel about my scholarship? Would I feel OK standing up in front of the foremost scholars in my field and telling them about my research? Does imagining this feel exciting or terrifying?
• How I will feel if I am rejected ? How do I usually respond to failure? Have I ever just given up when I have failed at something or is my pattern of behaviour one where I keep trying until I succeed? Is my history one where I need to start smaller and then gradually grow in confidence?
• Who can I get support from if I get rejected? Can they help me with both the emotional and intellectual work required to regroup?
These are really important considerations and rarely get enough airtime in either early- senior researcher or peer-to-peer conversations.
And two final comments in a more sociological vein:
1. It’s important to note what else is happening in conversations about going for it. The references to going for it are intended to be encouraging. However, there are shades here of ‘real men don’t eat quiche’. These conversations discursively position those who decide NOT to have a go at top journals as lacking in courage, gutless and feeble – and are they then potentially less than real ‘top’ scholars? Real ‘top’ scholars go for it, the rest of the pack are by definition lesser? And is scholarship positioned here as an extreme sport? Is that what we want it to be?
2. Two, dealing with the affective domain of scholarly work is not a plea for therapy for researchers. Rather it is an argument that, in failing to include discussions of the dark side of publishing, we perpetuate a situation where scholarship is seen as predominantly about thinking. The only emotional work that counts is the courage to have a go. Most of us reject the mind/emotion binary at an intellectual level and also the elevation of a boys-own-daring-do above all other affect. It is therefore somewhat bizarre that our conversations about publication rarely acknowledge the full range of cognitive and emotional labour that is involved. We do ourselves and those we intend to support a disservice by not doing so.
I haven’t finished with this topic. I will in future consider the purposes of publication and how the discipline might affect a decision whether to go for it or not.
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doing the literature review – thinking about patterns and groups
If you’ve ever watched small children playing then you’ll know that one of the things that they do is to sort things into groups. A bunch of coloured pens, pencils and markers can be sorted by type, colour, size, shape, condition and so on. Type and colour could be expected to come before shape and condition – but not always.
Another thing that children do is to find patterns and repeat them over and over. I used to enjoy making patterns using a compass when I was in primary school. Looking back I can’t imagine why, but the teacher in me knows that I was also learning about shapes and spatial and mathematical relationships.
These two activities – grouping and finding patterns – are fundamental to the way that children learn about the world. They learn big categories of things first, like dog – and then learn that the big group can be further divided up – into breeds in the case of dogs. They also learn that patterns can be made out of groups of things. A picture of dogs might be divided into breeds and then organised into a pattern of sizes and colours.
This kind of learning-as-categorising is fundamental to making knowledge through research.
We are engaged in constructing groups out of bits of data. We clump them together in some way according to a logic that we need to articulate and justify. Then we often have to invent a new category name to describe the group, rather than taking one which already exists. When we talk about grouping in data analysis we usually think of this as thematising. We also make new patterns out of our data, and again, we sometimes have to make up names for the pattern we have generated through our analytic activities.
Grouping and patterning are also fundamental to the literature review.
After reading a lot of texts you are able to put groups of them together because they are about the same topic or take the same epistemological approach, or use the same methods or the same samples or have similar concerns. These groups can be named something appropriate to their common focus and their shared characteristics can then be discussed. Many people advocate mind-mapping as a means of grouping.
An example of how this kind of grouping might inform the organisation of a literature review might go something like …
Literatures in higher education can be discussed in terms of their disciplinary focus or whether they address substantive issues of practice. The two most common practice topics addressed are pedagogical change and staff development. Each of these takes up questions of online learning, the subject of my research. In this literature review I therefore firstly address online learning and pedagogical change and then secondly discuss x aspects of professional development, viz. I then return to the disciplinary literatures to see how the specificities of ’subject’ might need to be taken into account in each of these two areas and in my research project.
Once you can see that there are different groups of texts, it is also often possible to see a pattern that has emerged. For example, many topics fall into disciplinary patterns – they might come from either a sociological or a psychological discipline for example; the ways in which these disciplines shape what is done, seen and said cuts across groups. Or it may be that there is a recognisable chronological pattern – the way that research has been conducted, or a problem understood – can be seen to follow a particular set of stages. We often talk for example of first, second and third wave feminism. This is a pattern.
Understandings of patterning can similarly inform the ways in which a literature review is organised. For example…
Research into peer friendships can be located within three distinct disciplinary frames – medical, psychological and sociological. There is also an educational literature. My particular research works in the sociological tradition. I therefore firstly provide a brief review of what might be learned from the medical and psychological literatures. I then discuss the distinguishing epistemological and methodological features of a sociological approach before going to onto a more detailed discussion of the major themes that are found in these literatures. I next canvass the relevant educational texts and conclude by addressing feminist educational studies of peer friendships, since this is where my research is situated and aims to make its contribution.
In these two examples groups and patterns have provided a way to organise the literature review. This organisation is flagged up at the start of the writing and the meta-commentary forms a road map for the various sections of the text to come.
It is also worth noting the ‘funnelling’ process that occurs in the latter example; it begins with the big discipline groups and then moves inwards to a specific disciplinary subgroup.
In a future post I will talk about storyboarding as a way of thinking about meta-commentary and organisation.
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