Getting your research work accepted and published in a reputable journal can improve your academic career marginally. This final journal article submission checklist will assist you to organize, chronologize, and prioritize every factor of article preparation for academic journal article submission. It is believed that you have already formulated your hypotheses, decided your methods, accumulated your materials, conducted your research, established your results, and drawn your conclusions. Now, you are prepared to put all of it together in a coherent text.
Selecting a Target Journal
Your subject matter may be sufficient enough that you have always had one journal in mind. If not, and in case you are uncertain about which journal to approach with your article, remember to review the sources that guided your research. If several of your sources were published in identical journals, that journal is probably an amazing fit for your article. If your sources were published in a lot of main journals (that is frequently the case), don’t forget which journal is the most prestigious in your field (e.g., its impact factor). Also, keep in mind which element of your research you want to focus on in your journal article.
Writing the Article
Write your abstract as a concise review of the entire scope of the paper, following the journal’s necessities for abstract length, structure, and keyword creation. See how to begin a story with a hook to make your readers want to read more. Encompass all important authorial data, including your complete and accurate name(s), appropriate author ranking in phrases of contribution to the article, formal affiliations for the author(s), modern contact information for the corresponding author(s), and biographical data for the author(s), if needed.
Acknowledge everybody who helped you with this project, including scholarships, grants, permissions, and informal assistance (e.g., from students). Create any required appendices, including supplementary tables or additional diagrams.
Finally, set up your references by double-checking the connection between the text’s citations and the complete bibliographic materials. Finally, title, caption, and import the figures (if you’re using the picture and/or video files) both directly within the article or as a separate file or folder of images and/or videos.
Formatting
You want to set up the formatting of the document(s) you will submit to the publisher. Some journals select one document layout over another (e.g., a PDF instead of a Word file or more than one paper copy instead of a LaTeX file). Some journals offer templates (e.g., standardized Word files or pre-encoded LaTeX files) to ensure consistency in formatting, however, others simply list their rules for page size, font size, line spacing, heading style, etc. The key is to comply with the publisher’s guidelines exactly to make the best first impression. If the publisher presents a template, use it. If the publisher lists formatting guidelines, follow them.
Checking Copyright Issues
Consider how the research for this journal article connects to the research you’ve carried out for different courses as an author or co-author. Did you use thoughts from a previous paper that you (or a coauthor) had developed? Is it enough to cite the previous document, or did you reuse specific sections of it?
If the latter, you’ll nearly certainly require permission from the other publication’s copyright holder. The good news is that academic publishers are typically happy to assist you to reuse components of their ideas as long as you include a right citation to the original work and perhaps a gratitude note withinside the acknowledgments.
Evaluate whether or not your journal article submission will include quotes from different works, and whether or not those quotations will be taken into consideration as fair usage. This will not be an issue for you in case you do not quote directly from different sites. Those who did significantly quote from different sources have to check your target journal’s suggestions to see whether or not you want to acquire permission to cite certain texts. Copyright clearance may be time-consuming and costly to get, so see in case your target journal has a staff committed to obtaining the rights to reproduce texts, in addition to the budget set aside to pay the costs of copyrighted content.
Concise Checklist
- Do the title and abstract of your paper reflect the subject of the journal?
- Does the general thesis declaration of the paper align with the disciplinary strain that your journal is taking? (To reduce an extended story short: Ensure that you are not submitting your natural science paper to an anthropology journal. This can get a bit complicated with interdisciplinary papers)
- Does this journal care about the research query you are trying to address?
- Have you adhered to the right citation style and other style concerns specified by the journal?
- Is your paper formatted appropriately?
- Margins
- Font and font size
- Section arrangement
- Proper labeling of figures/diagrams and tables
- Page numbers
- Table of contents
- Have all of your sources been cited correctly?
- Does each entry in your reference section have references to the textual content in your paper?
- Have you passed your plagiarism limit? (Depending on your discipline, this can be anywhere from 1% and 15%. For example, literature critiques and theoretical articles have extra leeway than empirical studies)
- Acknowledgments section.
- Logistical Concerns –Name(s) of authors and affiliations, Contact information, Cover letter, etc.