Writing for Research

Raewyn Connell

The last stage of all is the waiting. This can be disconcerting. If it’s a high-prestige
journal, you can wait for a couple of years before seeing your work in print. By then the
discussion in the field may have moved on, and you have probably moved on to other
problems too.

Publication lag is not a new thing. One of the most famous articles in classical
scholarship announced Michael Ventris’ astonishing decipherment of the mysterious
Linear B script on the ancient clay tablets of Crete and mainland Greece. This paper
had the catchy title “Evidence for Greek dialect in the Mycenaean archives”. It was
submitted to the Journal of Hellenic Studies in November 1952 and published unusually
quickly, nine months later.

Decipher this! A Linear B tablet (Image: Wikimedia
Commons)

But while the authors were waiting,

the news leaked out, and reached

the media – resulting in an editorial

in The Times and international

celebrity for Ventris, all before the

scholarly article appeared.

Because of the lag problem, many

mainstream journals now publish an

article on-line soon after it is

accepted and copy-editing is

complete. You then have to wait

until the journal issue to which it is

allocated comes round, before you

have the details of volume and

issue number. Oddly, you may end

up with two different dates of

publication for one article. (Believe

it or not, there is now a bibliometric

research literature about this

problem.) Purely on-line journals

simplify this and usually mean

quicker publication, so they have

become more popular, especially in

the physical and biomedical

sciences.

Online or offline, your article has

finally hit the streets. Now open the

champagne, and invite the

neighbours in! Your work has joined

the vast, troubled, but inspiring

collective effort to develop human

knowledge and understanding.