Professional Conferences
Chapter 11 Publishing
11.3 When and Where to Submit Papers
One of the hardest skills to learn is when a paper is ready to submit for pub- lication. You want the paper to be of high quality, but you also do not want to endlessly tinker with the paper without ever sending it out. You do not want striving for perfection to become the enemy of producing something that is very good. Young scholars are best served to ask their advisor and other more ex- perienced scholars to read their manuscripts before sending them out. Get the advice of people you trust. Also, graduate students get exposed to hundreds of published articles in their seminars. Young authors should try to assess whether their manuscripts have the same qualities as the articles they read for seminars.
When you do submit a manuscript to a journal for consideration for publi- cation, you want to make sure that the paper is written professionally. Edit the paper the best that you can, present professional looking tables and figures, and format the paper in compliance with the journal’s requirements. You need to take the quality of your work seriously if you expect an editor and reviewers to do so. Believe me, anonymous reviewers will not be shy in pointing out sloppy work. Chapter 8 provides detailed advice on professional writing. My point here is that you do not want to send out anything with your name on it that is not profession- ally written.
Some scholars say that you should send every manuscript you have to the top journal in your discipline first. If you get rejected, you should move to the #2
journal next, and so forth until the manuscript is accepted. The goal is to maximize your chances of getting articles published in top journals, with the idea being that there is some luck/randomness in the publication process. Maybe you’ll get lucky and land an article in the top journal if you just try often enough.
I strongly recommend against pursuing this strategy. First, I think it is profes- sionally irresponsible to waste the time of editors and reviewers if you do not hon- estly believe your manuscript has a reasonable chance to be accepted. Reviewer overload has become a serious challenge for editors. Second, such a process may take years before you get an article accepted. Third, you really don’t want to be the author of a paper that got published in a top journal that really should not have been. It is not really “lucky” to be the author of the paper widely viewed as subpar compared to the journal in which it is published.
For papers to be appropriate for top tier general journals, they need to make a clear theoretical contribution and have strong supporting evidence based on an appropriate research design. The theoretical contribution should be more than incremental. The paper must also be of interest to, and have implications for, scholars working in multiple subfields within the discipline. This is a high bar to clear. The top three journals in political science routinely reject more than 90% of the submissions they receive each year. Many good papers get rejected, but many of those papers should have never been submitted to these journals. A paper that makes a substantial theoretical contribution based on an excellent design and analysis, but only has relevance to a single subfield will rightly be rejected by a top journal.
Looking at my own publications to illustrate this point, I and my co-authors sent a collection of three papers to top general journals because we were offering a new theoretical framework for party polarization we called conflict extension, a micro-level theory for how this process works, and a theory and evidence sup- porting the idea that conflict extension is primarily an activist-led process.1 In
1The three papers in question, respectively, are: “Party Polarization and Conflict Extension in
the American Electorate.”American Journal of Political Science(2002) 46:786-802, with Geoffrey Layman, “Changing Sides or Changing Minds? Party Identification and Policy Preferences in the American Electorate.”American Journal of Political Science(2006) 50(2): 464-77, with Geoffrey C. Layman, and “Activists and Conflict Extension in American Party Politics.”American Political Science Review(2010) 104(2):324-46, with Geoffrey C. Layman, John C. Green, Richard Herrera, and Rosalyn Cooperman.
contrast, our papers focused on a particular target audience2or made a more nar- row contribution to a particular subfield.3
I think it is a great idea to start research projects with the idea of producing papers strong enough for the very top journals in your field. If you start a project believing that the best hope for publication is a third-tiered journal no one else has ever heard of, I suggest not starting the project at all. Your ambition should be a top general journal or a top subfield journal when you begin a project. However, once you are to the point of writing a manuscript, you should be realistic about where you send it first. Young scholars should get advice from mentors and faculty members they trust. All scholars must ultimately rely on their own judgment.
There are also practical considerations that arise. For example, if you are try- ing to get a paper published before going on the job market or up for promotion, you might not have time to let a paper get rejected two or three times at top jour- nals. On a related note, editors of different journals develop reputations for how long they take to process a submission. If two journals are similarly appropriate for your paper, but one has a reputation of being particularly slow, you might try the other journal first if you are facing some time constraint.
At the same time, sending a great paper to a journal nobody has heard of just to guarantee a publication is also a mistake. Publishing in unknown outlets will generally not help you get a job or get promoted. The trick is to develop the skill to evaluate the prospects of a paper realistically. If you are unsure, or if you’re getting conflicting advice, I suggest thinking about what might prevent the paper from being successful at the higher outlet, making changes if possible, and giving the higher journal a shot.
Some scholars also advise students or others to submit a paper for publication just to receive a set of reviews for feedback. I strongly disagree with this advice as well. The review process is there to serve the decision-making of editors and to protect the integrity of published research. It is not there to provide advice to authors about how to improve their manuscripts. As will be discussed below,
2For example, see “Can You Repeat that Please? Using Monte Carlo Simulation in Graduate
Quantitative Research Methods Classes.” Journal of Political Science Education, (2015) 11(1) 94-107, with Jeffrey J. Harden.
3For example, see “State Legislative Elections, 1967-2003: Announcing the Completion of
a Cleaned and Updated Dataset.”State Politics and Policy Quarterly(2008) 8(4): 430-43, with Richard G. Niemi, William D. Berry, Lynda W. Powell, and James M. Snyder, Jr.
conscientious reviewers do provide such advice, but it is an unfair and unprofes- sional exploitation of the review process to submit manuscripts simply to get the feedback. Friends, advisors, and other colleagues should be providing that initial advice.