Academic Publishing: Making the Implicit Explicit

Abstract

For doctoral students, publishing in peer-reviewed journals is a task many face with anxiety and trepidation. The world of publishing, from choosing a journal, negotiating with editors and navigating reviewers' responses is a bewildering place. Looking in from the outside, it seems that successful and productive academic writers have knowledge that is inaccessible to novice scholars. While there is a growing literature on writing for scholarly publication, many of these publications promote writing and publishing as a straightforward activity that anyone can achieve if they follow the rules. We argue that the specific and situated contexts in which academic writers negotiate publishing practices is more complicated and messy. In this paper, we attempt to make explicit our publishing processes to highlight the complex nature of publishing. We use autoethnographic narratives to provide discussion points and insights into the challenges of publishing peer reviewed articles. One narrative is by a doctoral student at the beginning of her publishing career, who expresses her desires, concerns and anxieties about writing for publication. The other narrative focuses on the publishing practices of a more experienced academic writer. Both are international scholars working in the Canadian context. The purpose of this paper is to explore academic publishing through the juxtaposition of these two narratives to make explicit some of the more implicit processes. Four themes emerge from these narratives. To publish successfully, academic writers need: (1) to be discourse analysts; (2) to have a critical competence; (3) to have writing fluency; and (4) to be emotionally intelligent.

Unpacking the Lore on Multilingual Scholars Publishing in English: A Discussion Paper

“…Indeed, our research shows a strong centripetal pull toward the interplay of research topics, preferred research methodologies, and currently circulating theoretical lenses [18]. However, even within rigid regimes of practice and evaluation, variety has been documented, such as, for example, the order of sections in research articles [117][118][119]. Swales [120] in fact advocates for "experimentation in both style and substance" of academic writing, suggesting that established conventions can be successfully flouted and not only by senior scholars (p. 251).…”

Graduate Transitions

“…Lindsay (2015) posits that situational, writing, and emotional factors all play a role in promoting or hindering thesis completion, and Odena and Burgess (2017) identify personal organization and the need for "individually tailored supportive feedback" as key components in their qualitative research on facilitating strategies for thesis writing (p. 572). As Badenhorst and Xu (2016) conclude, academic writers need both critical competence and emotional intelligence to succeed as published researchers.…”

“…The use of graduate genres, development of a professional voice, and, perhaps the ultimate mark of acceptance, peer-reviewed publication, all fall within this territory and, not coincidentally, are key obstacles identified in the research on graduate writing. Several studies note that these professional markers are also intersected by personal capabilities such as the ability to handle stress and resilience in the face of uncertainty (Badenhorst & Xu, 2016;Holmes et al, 2018;Huerta et al, 2017). Lindsay (2015) posits that situational, writing, and emotional factors all play a role in promoting or hindering thesis completion, and Odena and Burgess (2017) identify personal organization and the need for "individually tailored supportive feedback" as key components in their qualitative research on facilitating strategies for thesis writing (p. 572).…”

“…Indeed, in a general sense, Canadian writing instruction varies significantly from U.S. models due, as Kevin Brooks (2002), Nan Johnson (2006), Judith Kearns and Brian Turner (2008) explain, to national and institutional histories which tended to favour literary approaches and often did not make discursive expectations explicit. Existing Canadian-based research on graduate writing has not directly addressed this history; however, Canadian studies such as those by Starke-Meyerring (2011), Badenhorst and Xu (2016), Stooke and Hibbert (2017), and Badenhorst (2018a) emphasize the need for greater transparency regarding graduate writing expectations, suggesting the impacts of this pedagogical legacy. Doreen Starke-Meyerring (2011) specifically points to the tacit assumptions behind Canadian graduate writing, noting how these impact doctoral writers' progress and suggesting the need for a graduate curriculum that examines "the roles of writing and discourse in the production of knowledge, researcher identity, disciplinarity" (p. 93).…”

Early career experiences of navigating journal article publication: Lessons learned using an autoethnographic approach

“…While some fortunate ECRs would have been mentored through this process as doctoral students, ‘most doctoral programs provide little in the way of pedagogical support for students to meet the demand of greater output’ (Badenhorst & Xu, , p. 1), and as such, many ECRs may lack confidence in this area. The production of an academic journal article involves the creation of a text type that ECRs consume in high volumes, particularly in the foundational literature review phases of their own research.…”