Writing a journal article

Publish or perish! It’s a pretty melodramatic phrase, but it does convey one of the realities of a career in academia. To get and keep a job at most academic institutions, you need to have a solid portfolio of peer-reviewed publications. But how exactly do you get published? It’s a question that many early career researchers ask.

Publication processes are often quite opaque and rely on a prior knowledge of the systems. If you don’t have an active, engaged and generally brilliant supervisor, training and guidance can be hard to find. Coupled with the fact that rejection is a very common occurrence for all authors, regardless of experience or stature (Editors have manuscripts rejected from their own journals in some cases!) the whole process can seem daunting to anyone – especially when you’re approaching it for the first time.

But publishing doesn’t need to be a scary or unnerving experience. Having a little bit of knowledge about what’s expected of you as an author can go a really long way. So, here at Edinburgh University Press, we decided to put together a guide to creating your manuscript. In this guide, we’ll cover how to structure a journal manuscript, how to decide where to send it, what to include in a cover letter and some tips on optimising your article for search engines.

We hope that you find the advice in this guide helpful and that it makes the process of publishing your manuscript (ideally with an Edinburgh University Press journal!) a bit more of an enjoyable experience.

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