journal editor you are targeting before you begin work.
Give a brief outline of what you propose and the
treatment you will use, and make clear that the length
will be strictly 5000 to 6000 words. Check that the
journal has not published a review article on this theme
recently, because the editor will not want to repeat such a
piece within three or four years. The editor may then
either write back putting you off the project (which
avoids your spending time on it abortively), or they may
say that they cannot commit themselves to accept it but
that it sounds interesting and they would like to referee the
full version in the normal way. Very rarely they may be
more positive than this, in effect semi-commissioning the
piece from you.Research notes, comments, pieces in short-article journals, and
review articles are all excellent ways of beginning to publish at
the start of an academic career.
Getting your material published
The first barrier new authors face in publishing papers is a
psychological one. Main papers in academic journals are delib-
erately made hard-boiled and less accessible products by what
Minkin calls ‘the convention of perfection in presentation and
the reconstructed logic of events that accompanies it’.^7 Papers
often systematically perpetuate a myth about how their authors
did research. The author or research team read the existing lit-
erature and ingeniously identified a problem, seen by none or
very few people before them. They then coined a new theory;
or saw how to apply an existing theory in an interesting way;
or generated a distinct empirical test and prediction; or devised
a new method for analysing an intractable problem; or they dis-
covered a key new source hitherto neglected; or otherwise had
a brilliant research idea of their own. Next they applied this
new approach in a precise, targeted fashion, going to exactly
the right data, evidence or sources first time. Of course, thanks
to their perceptiveness, the authors almost immediately gener-
ated interesting results, generally confirmatory of their initial
PUBLISHING YOUR RESEARCH◆ 241