A Guide to Getting Published

Editor's Notes

1. If you understand why papers are often rejected, then you can try to avoid these pitfalls and improve your chances of getting to the review stage
2. The building blocks of your paper are….we will look at some of the key areas and how you can optimise and improve them
3. A good title should contain the fewest possible words that adequately describe the contents of a paper – leads onto the next slide on importance of keywordsExercise - provide an example of an long and complicated title and ask the audience to make suggestions for improvementEffective titlesIdentify the main issue of the paperBegin with the subject of the paperAre accurate, unambiguous, specific, and completeAre as short as possibleArticles with concisetitles are often better citedDo not contain rarely-used abbreviationsAttract readers
4. Don’t be too general, or you will be lost in a landslide of results, but avoid being too specific, as you want to use words that people will naturally think of
5. Important to establish we you are with regards to existing research in order to then explain what you are addingFigures, images and webpages all need referencing
6. If you have done empirical research, you need to state your methodology clearly and under a separate heading.
7. Examples:EfthymiosConstantinides, in "Influencing the online consumer's behaviour: the Web experience" (Internet Research, Vol. 14 No. 2), summarizes the main issues of web experience for the online consumer under the main headings which they found to be important in the literature, in such a way both researcher and practitioner can get a good idea of the main themes.In "Some moderating effects on the service quality-customer retention link" (ChaturaRanaweera and Andy Neely, International Journal of Operations & Production Management, Vol. 23 No. 2), the authors describe their results, and the statistical tests they ran, in sufficient detail to give several pages of discussion on their results.Clyde A. Warden et al., in "Service failures away from home: benefits in intercultural service encounters" (International Journal of Service Industry Management, Vol. 14 No. 4), start their discussion of results by stating what they included in the analysis – only those service failures that were equally represented in both cultural settings. The statistical tests (ANOVA, Chi-square) are discussed in relation to how they impact on the study's overall objectives. The results are linked back to the hypotheses.James U. McNeal and F. Ji Mindy, in "Children's visual memory of packaging" (Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 20 No. 3), present the results of their study summarized according to relevance to visual memory. There is also an extensive discussion section.
8. Make sure you highlight what is different about your research/results/findings – what stands out, or is unexpected?As Emerald's philosophy is based on the idea of research into practice, most journal editors and reviewers are particularly keen on a statement of implications for the practitioner. This statement, along with one describing the implications for further research, should be within the conclusion somewhere, either within a section heading "Conclusion" or "Discussion", or in a separate section. Obviously in some cases it may not be possible to make such statements, but all research papers should state implications for research, and most papers will have implications for practice.
9. Proofread and re-check at every stage – make sure you have full confidence in the accuracy of your research and how you are communicating with the reader