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Publishing Your Research

What good is a good idea if no one ever hears it?

AT & T advert^1

P

ublishing your work is the key way in which you can insert

it into the slipstream of academic ideas, and so avoid your

thesis becoming just ‘shelf-bending’ research, sitting in your

university library and slowly bending a shelf over the years. The

main route is to submit papers to professional journals. More

rarely you can reshape your whole thesis into book form and

get it accepted by a publisher as a monograph. Neither form of

publication is quick or straightforward. They can protract

your end-game long past the formal date at which your title

metamorphoses into Dr.

Writing and submitting journal papers

How odd it is that anyone should not see that all

observation must be for or against some view if it

is to be of any service.

Charles Darwin^2

A journal paper is an apparently simple-looking artefact, but it

is not shaped just by the author. The professional community

as a whole influences what is published, by fixing the norms

and conventions of learned journals. And the editors and

referees of a journal normally set specific conditions for each

article. To be effective in publishing papers you need first to

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