Publishing research findings is part of academic life and it is the same for those just starting out their journey as a PhD candidate. Doctoral candidates at Griffith University are expected to get at least one publication during their candidature. That publication usually takes the form of a journal article, review or a chapter in an academic anthology. Most of the academic publishers have generic advice and guidance about how to approach publishers on their website. For example, Elsevier, one of the leading academic publishers, offers the following advice to authors approaching any of their high impact journals:

  1. When preparing the manuscript, ask yourself some questions such as what you want to communicate, why you want to publish your work, and whether your work going to influence other researchers. If the answer is yes, then go ahead and try to publish your work.
  2. Make your manuscript publication worthy is another advice that Elsevier[1] (2020) suggests. A worthy article should have a clear message. The reader should see the paper as logic as the author and hopefully arrive at the same conclusions. The article should also have a clear title and abstract, so the reader knows straight away what the paper will be about. Finally, the story you tell should also be concise and logical.
  3. Writing a good cover letter is something that we, people at the beginning of the academic journey, might often overlook. However, writing a good cover letter is important when submitting to a journal. This is the opportunity you have to convince the editor that your research is worth publishing. While a strong letter might not guarantee a publication, a poorly written letter might scare the editor off. To write the letter you need to show the editor how the paper is a good fit for the journal. You might also add information that is relevant but might not fit the abstract.
  4. Organise and present your paper properly: Write an effective findings or discussion section. Use paragraph headings to describe your findings and make your discussion match your findings.
  5. Acknowledge your sources. Ensure you give credit to all papers you have referenced along your document, yet you might not want to use too many references. You need to make sure you understand the material you are referencing. Try to include references from different places, do not limit yourself to specific locations.

A little closer to home, we spoke to two of GIER’s HDR candidates who are based at Mount Gravatt campus. Danson Zheng and Nicola Stewart recently had an article published in Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence, a Q1 journal.  Their paper is called Improving EFL students’ cultural awareness: Reframing moral dilemmatic stories with ChatGPT. The article considers how to effectively and ethically work with generative AI to produce culturally appropriate EFL teaching materials.  Following positive feedback at GIER’s 2023 Methodology Matters forum, Nicola and Danson submitted the article in December 2023. It was published four months later, in April 2024 (see here). They offer a few additional tips to developing a publishable article:

  • Be open to peer collaboration – their article covers themes that are at the intersection of their doctoral research projects. Developing an awareness of where research projects might overlap comes from taking opportunities to work with others. Nicola and Danson are both involved in the EDJEE and OWL groups at Mount Gravatt. EDJEE is a fortnightly reading group that focusses on issues relating to the sociology of education. The EDJEE group involves both supervisors and HDR students interested in discussing their different readings of theoretical and methodological research articles. Further details about the EDJEE group can be found here. The OWL group focuses on academic writing practices and is student-led. The OWL group also contributed to their writing efforts by providing feedback at different points in the writing process. Other papers have also been developed from the collaboration of OWL members (see here), with additional articles due for both submission and publication in the near future.
  • Record your ideas for future writing projects – Danson has an excel sheet where he writes ideas for future papers. When he sees a relevant call for papers, he already has the idea written down and just needs to adapt it to the call. ‘All those ideas happen’, Danson said. He is not making up ideas just for the sake of publishing something, but developing ideas from his doctoral project and from collaborative work with peers. All the ideas that did not fit alongside the contents for the published article have been moved to the excel sheet, where they are safely stored until the right opportunity arises.
  • Write in tandem – Although there are many ways to write collaboratively, Nicola and Danson decided to write in tandem. They started with a document online, where they wrote their ideas asynchronously. These ideas began as a list of bullet points under pre-agreed sections, with frequent comments to each other about any aspects that raised concerns. The pair then divided the methodological sections based on their skills and interests. While Nicola did the appraisal analysis of generated text, Danson worked on the Artificial intelligence (Chat GPT) prompt engineering section. As they both worked online in one document, they were surprised about how fast they wrote the paper. The first full draft of 8000 words was completed in two weeks.
  • Participate in organised events – As mentioned earlier, the paper started as a contribution to our 2023 Methodology Matters forum. Their supervisors encouraged all students to present something, no matter what stage of development the item represented. As well as focussing on methodology, the forum offered students an opportunity to organise their work differently and to practice oral presentation skills. At the time, both Danson and Nicola were at awkward points in their doctoral journeys – and the idea of committing to presenting alone was daunting. Working together helped them overcome their individual challenges. Both students also noted the valuable experience of submitting draft work to GIER members – Drs Roberta Thompson and Chris Bigum, who were positioned as editors in the forum development process as well as to their joint supervisor Professor Parlo Singh.
  • Rejection and revision don’t mean failure – the article was originally submitted to Computers in Education, but the editors of that journal returned the article saying that it wasn’t suitable for them but would suit their sister publication. Danson and Nicola agreed to switching the submission, Two sets of relatively minor corrections occurred (following peer reviews) before the article was finally published.

As a side note, while not enough discussed, being rejected is something researchers often experience.  Ensuring that the paper aligns with the selected journal in terms of topic, methodology and/or context is crucial. It is also important to remember that when writing the paper, you should reference articles from the chosen journal, essentially positioning your article as part of an ongoing conversation with the other authors published in the journal.

These two students seemed very happy with their outcome and the speed of the publication process. Receiving a response from an academic journal can often take several months.

While we at GIER are thrilled about their new publication, we wanted to share their experience to inspire other students. Despite the challenges, the publication journey is often rewarding.