The first thing you need to do when trying to get something you've written published is to decide where you want to publish it. There are a few things to consider:
- Generally, but not always, the better a place is (higher impact, more respected) the harder it is to get in. Especially if you are coming out of a masters degree any publication can be a great addition to your CV. And also, any publication makes your work more visible; most likely it will be disseminated mostly through social media anyway. So while for a PhD student I'd usually say "start at your top aspiration, and if that fails work your way down," that's less true for someone doing this basically as a hobby / public good for humanity.
- If you are trying to impact policy, it can also be important to get it out quickly, which again is often but not always going to be easier for well easier publications, e.g. newsletters, archives, blogs, conference proceedings.
- Note that you can start with something fast and easy and then work your way up. It's quite normal now to archive early drafts, if you can get them accepted to the archive.
- Don't try to publish to a venue full of papers by "fools" who haven't yet been appreciating the importance of work like yours. Rather, publish where other stuff from your area is published – preach to the choir. Even within conferences, this is true about choosing keywords – choose keywords used by the others who publish work most like yours (it took me a few years of my PhD to figure this out.) I fully understand the impulse to evangelise, but this is not the time. Maybe one day you'll get a chance to draw your work to the attention of other fields, but get published first. Remember: getting reviewed by domain experts is an important part of the academic process, and will (*likely) make your article better.
- *Unfortunately, there can be a form of bullying in academia where people either don't accept papers from people not already in the "in" group, or maybe even worse, will accept only stripped-down, weaker versions of papers. If your reviews seem like too much of a compromise of your work, get some mentoring (maybe including from the editor) – it may be a reason to start over with a different venue.
- It's a good idea to start out by looking at your own bibliography: whatever venue you cite from most for that specific paper is likely to be the best one for you to target, unless what you did is really of a very different scale or calibre.
- Any venue where you are thinking of publishing, be sure to flip through a few recent issues / proceedings to make sure your work could fit in, and then do a proper search and make sure you've read related works from that venue, and (of course!) cited them.
- Don't forget also to read the venue's guidance to authors which will also be on line, but that's really the second step, after you've chosen the venue. Unless there's a show stopper there such as an incompatible word length constraint or stupid publishing fee structure that sends you to your second choice publication venue.
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| Sometimes it's hard to find the right place. |
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