More Suggestions for Your First Articles as a Graduate Student

Writing articles. This can be a pretty stressful task if you are in a research oriented program and not working on a project where you are expected to publish with your advisor or other faculty. I envy other graduate students who have had that kind of excellent apprenticeship. On the other hand, you already know how to write, so it is possible to learn how to write scholarly articles. 

One of the key things you should know is that publication is usually a very long process, so you should push yourself to start on it early in your graduate career. Unlike blogs or newspaper articles, going through one or more rounds of peer review will basically ensure that your work will be properly vetted. In fact, another advantage that of this longer process is that I have realized that it allows me to let research papers go out before I actually "feel ready" or feel that the writing is perfect. With long time horizons, there will still be plenty of time to make sure that I'm going to be happy with the final product. (Besides, almost all articles will require revisions to respond to the peer review comments.)

Another key problem is having data to write about. As a social scientist, it is usually not sufficient to just write a theory paper or a literature review, meaning that some kind of data must be processed and analyzed. You might be gearing up to do a large survey or international research for the dissertation project, but that doesn't mean you should wait to find publishable pieces. It would make sense to use a smaller project or class assignment for this purpose instead, and while that is easier for quantitative researchers to collect some useful bits of data, qualitative researchers can do this as well. One of the easiest ways to get some reasonable empirical data is to just do a quick IRB and a local participant observation project on some phenomenon; even without interviews, you could get something interesting with a reasonably low hassle or time factor. (In my own case, I went to Chicago auctions in the beginning and watched bidding, which was helpful for later observation on my larger project.) Just make sure to apply for IRB clearance beforehand -- although this is not required for a class project, it is required for publishing with human subjects research, cannot be applied for retrospectively, and it is another good thing to practice.

Once you have written a draft paper, based on data, for a class or otherwise, it might be a good idea to submit it to a conference, and/or present it at a scholarly workshop. This will help you to get some more input on the theory and methods of your study, and be sure to write up comments soon after so that you don't forget them.

Now comes decision time, and you should critically assess the level of quality of the work. Be honest with yourself about quality and think about the current paper length and most interesting findings to focus on. I don't advocate putting out sloppy research, but even if you realized that you had some major flaws, most studies should have some interesting parts that you could focus on, and feel free to round file the other parts. (Or save them for later, because you never know -- however, remember that you will need to keep up your IRB clearance if you later want to reanalyze human subjects data with identifiable information, otherwise you would need to strip out any names and identifiers, deleting/shredding any files that were used to keep a real names list of subjects.) Thinking about the parts of the research to use can be stressful, which is also why taking the work to a conference or workshop for peer feedback is helpful - helpful to help you realize what parts of your findings were interesting to other people and the types of related literature that you will need to draw from. 

Once you have a reasonable paper, with some interesting parts, and not too long, then you need to find a potential publishing venue and revise the work for submission. I think revision is some of the hardest work, but it does get easier, and it certainly improves the quality of the findings. This is also the stage where you should start on the focused literature review. One of the typical problems I see with student papers is when someone has done the literature review for a class, but then the actual findings of the data point to a completely different theoretical area. Don't fall into the trap of being lazy about this problem, because it can cause rejections, and besides, you might be relying too much on the theoretical literature and not focusing enough on your actual data. Fixing this problem by cutting down and refocusing the literature review is part of the process.

A typical timeline for a paper with a small dataset would be 1) gathering data over a few months, analyzing and shaping the paper, 2) revising this for a workshop or conference, and then presenting, which can add a few months to a year, 3) Respond to peer comments from the presentation, pick a potential venue and revise for submission over 2-3 months. Depending on the journal, you might get a rejection, in which case you return to step 3, incorporating comments and picking a new journal target. When you do get a revise and resubmit, 4) you should respond to reviewer comments systematically, reshape the article to make sure that theory and data match, and tighten it up to meet the word count. Make sure that you really pay attention to your writing at this point, because it may be the last stage where you can make major revisions. Then 5) you will get a page proof, where you can review to check for any glaring errors and make a few minor fixes. Hopefully this gets you to 6) scheduled to publish, although that could be an unknown time in the future depending on how long the article queue is for the journal. 

Clearly, we all want major articles in major journals, but I think that it is less paralyzing to start out by focusing on subfield journals with shorter articles. Although I had a... disappointing experience with one such journal, and ended up pulling the manuscript, in other cases, I found that working with these smaller journals was helpful in terms of time, getting great feedback from the editors, and I also had helpful comments from reviewers. These focused journals won't have the larger readership of a generalist journal, but it is a nice way to start building your scholarly reputation. (Another target would be a graduate student journal, but subfield journals are probably going to be higher impact.) 

In order to focus on learning the mechanics of writing up a research article, an easy filter would be to look for journals that have a 5,000 to 8,000 word limit. That type of limit is also an easy way to figure out whether you have "enough" for an article - more than likely, you'll find out that you have way too much for just one of these. Throughout this process, you should expect to do many revisions, and they can sometimes be painful, such as figuring out which parts to cut to reduce the word count, but the advantage is that you will be (or at least should be) increasing the clarity and focus of your work. 

As part of the process, one of the best tools that I've found is to use a reverse outline. This has a lot of potential uses. 

1. This is helpful for figuring out how to revise the work for the initial journal submission - diagram article structure from sample papers of the journal where you want to submit, and use that as a template. This will be a nice mechanical exercise, but will help you to become acquainted with the stylistic conventions of the journal and how other people write about their research. Depending on the length of the article, I start with a first pass of the different sections, then eventually do a few on a paragraph by paragraph basis, asking "what does this particular paragraph do in terms of the argument?"

2. In order to focus your writing, do a reverse outline on your own paper. This will be helpful to figure out which pieces can be cut, and if you need to rearrange for clarity. 

3. When you finally get to an R&R, many months later, you can diagram your own writing as a way to figure out what the heck you were talking about, and show you where you need to make revisions.

4. When you feel stuck -- do this, either diagramming a different article for the journal or doing this with your own paper. I find that it almost always helps me to move out of that terrible place of not knowing quite what to do next with the article, or feeling lost in a sea of details. 

A note about reviewer comments: regardless of whether you were accepted or not, a good practice is to make those into a to-do list -- you don't have to do them all, but this helps to depersonalize them and make them into action items. It is also good form to to do this for a revise and resubmit, because as you do the edits, you are making a list of changes. Then you can include this list and your comments about which changes you did or didn't do, to include with your revised manuscript. It introduces a nice element of accountability into the process.