Author How To Guides

The journal remains one of the most popular methods of scholarly communication and, as a new researcher, you probably spent quite a bit of time and energy trying to get your articles published. Now, perhaps, you are an experienced scholar, fine-tuned to the particular movements and developments within your chosen discipline, and you have become aware of an area ripe for development, or one you think needs to be covered with a different slant. Here, Margaret Adolphus guides you through the process of developing and presenting your own journal proposal.

Being a volume editor is challenging, but it is also not without its rewards, presenting an opportunity for the scholar to develop him or herself in a new direction. Editing a single volume is a chance to develop skills of selecting, shaping and reviewing which are all important in the scholarly world. This "How to..." guide looks at some approaches to putting a multi-author volume together, and how to avoid some of the pitfalls.

Book reviews are a special form of academic writing. They have well-known structures with familiar components. Here, James Hartley of the School of Psychology, Keele University, UK, consults with academics on writing the perfect book review and presents a potential checklist for book reviewers.

A good promotions strategy will increase the impact of your work by getting more people to read your article, improving your citation ratings, and ensuring that your work becomes more widely known both within your academic and practitioner community and outside it. It will also help disseminate the practical and policy-related implications of your work to those who can implement it. This guide concentrates on strategies that will help you and your colleagues make your articles, as well as the wider research on which they are based, better known. If you are working as part of a research centre or larger research programme with major funding, then you will need to talk to your partners and your funding body about developing a proper communications strategy.

Many Emerald articles result from collaboration. Reasons for this include the: increasing importance of publication for tenure, promotion and satisfying the UK Research Assessment Exercise; tendency towards large, multidisciplinary projects; nature of research funding; pressure for PhD students to get out publications even before their PhD is approved; and greater ease afforded by electronic means of communication. This guide focuses on authorship and dissemination issues arising from collaborative research (issues concerning setting up a large research project team are covered in our Research Zone). This guide is based on the experiences of several authors from three continents.

Preparing and writing an academic article for publication in an English language journal is a daunting experience for anyone, but particularly so if your first language is not English. This guide gives you some support with preparing articles in a non-native tongue. It is not possible to give specific advice about English, because teaching English as a foreign language is a highly specialized area requiring a great deal of skill. However, we will provide general advice on writing articles and list some useful resources including editing services.

What gives being published in a journal especial credibility is that other experts have read the work and deemed it acceptable. The peer review process is therefore what gives the journal in which you have chosen to place your article, and your paper if you have done the necessary revisions, a quality control stamp. This guide offers advice on minimizing the chances of having to revise your work by getting it right in the first place, to a practical example of carrying out your own peer review.

As far as writing an article for publication is concerned, we are talking about authors proofreading before it goes to production. In many ways, it is more like copy-editing, which is about close attention to the detail of the script, reading at sentence level to make sure there is nothing that can detract from accuracy and clarity, be it errors of grammar, inconsistency, spelling, or punctuation. "If a paper is not carefully checked, then it looks not just sloppy, but as though the author does not care. So why should anyone else?" (John Peters, Emerald CEO and editor of Management Decision).

Reviewers of academic papers often point out that the language is unnecessarily obscure and obtuse. The reviewer or editor feels there is a good point in there somewhere, but it is not easy for the reader to find. In contrast, good English is economical and spares redundant words. In Lost for Words: The Use and Abuse of the English Language, John Humphrys describes the qualities of good English: "... clear, simple, plain and unambiguous ... free of jargon, although there will be exceptions. It should be easy to read and listen to rather than a chore. At the very least it should not make our tongues fur up". This guide provides suggestions on how you can make sure your style is as clear as possible.

According to one survey on why articles fail to get published in economics journals, there are two main reasons. Either the paper does not make, or does not demonstrate that it makes, a contribution to knowledge or the paper is badly organized, with the parts not fitting together to form a coherent whole. These two factors, which rated more highly in this survey than targeting the wrong journal, both relate to the paper's structure. Papers that are well structured will have a logical organization with a beginning, a middle and an end, and above all a sense of purpose which communicates itself to the reader, will motivate him or her to continue reading in the belief that the author is making a contribution to knowledge.

The Harvard reference system, also known as the author-date system, is Emerald's approved system of citing other works. Articles submitted to Emerald are required to use this system. This guide explains how and where to use references within the text of your article and how to compile the reference list at the end. We also look at some of the software tools that are available to simplify these tasks.

An abstract is a succinct summary of a longer piece of work, usually academic in nature, which is published in isolation from the main text and should therefore stand on its own and be understandable without reference to the longer piece. It should report the latter's essential facts, and should not exaggerate or contain material that is not there. Its purpose is to act as a reference tool (for example in a library abstracting service) and, more importantly, to enable the reader to decide whether or not to read the full text. It is your opportunity to gain readership and citation.

If you are an academic, then you have good job-related reasons to want to publish: your job and your promotion depend on you keeping up your publishing profile in quality scholarly journals. If you are a practising manager, however, writing for publication is not part of your job and can seem much less important than keeping up with your targets and the inevitable fire-fighting. This guide aims to explain the benefits of publishing to practising managers and to give advice on how to publish successfully.

Finding the right journal is as important to the publishing process as is having something original to say and saying it well. Many journal editors claim that a good proportion of their rejections happen not because manuscripts are of insufficient quality, but because they are inappropriate for the journal's objectives. As ever, it is easier (and usually leads to a more successful outcome) if you address these issues as early as possible.

A literature review is a description of the literature relevant to a particular field or topic. It gives an overview of what has been said, who the key writers are, what are the prevailing theories and hypotheses, what questions are being asked, and what methods and methodologies are appropriate and useful. As such, it is not in itself primary research, but rather it reports on other findings.

A case study involves focusing on a set of issues in some contemporary setting, usually but not exclusively an organization, or perhaps a department or sector of an organization. It may use just one case or a number of cases linked together by a theme. Because of its real-world setting, it is a powerful tool of analysis, and one that obviously chimes in with Emerald's concern to disseminate implications for practice. It is particularly good at addressing "how" and "why" questions.