I hadn’t come across this before, but @cwschmidt1 has posted this super useful set of tips on publishing in @LSI_Journal! https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/law-and-social-inquiry/tips-for-publishing-in-lsi
Journals are not just a place to land, a vehicle to get your work published, or a marker of prestige. They are part of an ongoing conversation with a specific audience. If you don’t care about that conversation and that audience, you’re sending your ms to the wrong journal.
Maybe a majority of articles are framed around an empirical/topical interest or maybe a subfield’s theory. But without framing for a more generalist audience, majority of readers not interested in the topic/empirical context or subfield theory won’t read it.
By not framing for a broader audience, we’re losing community. We’re forgetting what we have in common, what interests bind us together, and getting overly narrow and specialized. Focused on the bark of our special tree, and not the ecology of the forest.
Too many academic writers emphasize what’s novel about their paper—the first to study xyz—but this is a mistake if it’s at the expense of showing how the study connects with existing research. Tell us: Where is your paper on the family tree of academic research?
If you are struggling to frame your ms for a given journal, either (a) read a bunch of articles from that journal until something clicks and you find a conversation you can contribute, however abstractly removed from your empirical topic, or (b) choose a different journal.
Before you submit your work to a journal, read multiple articles from that journal to get a sense of the format and style. There will be some variation, but you can also see broad themes across articles. How do folks motivate their study? What literatures do they cite?
What are the standard headers? What level of detail do folks provide in their data and methods sections? What comes up in the conclusions? Styles can vary across editorial teams, but usually not a huge amount. Each journal has a flavor; learn it before submitting to it.
If you submit a manuscript to a journal you don’t read, you’re going to have a bad time.
If you say of a generalist journal, like I did in grad school, “there’s nothing in it that’s relevant to me,” either you shouldn’t submit to that journal or you have an overly narrow idea of what’s relevant, focusing on empirical topics instead of theories, concepts, and debates.
It’s really hard to specify your contribution to the literature if you aren’t familiar with the literature.
I tell students that from day 1, their top goal should be learning the literatures relevant to what they want to study and methods. Don’t try to write papers before that!
If you have a journal in mind and it seems like a good fit, don’t worry if you want to introduce a new method or theory or literature. Just make sure to add something new while also doing something familiar. Show how your work still fits by engaging with existing debates/lit.
Ppl sometimes think you can’t do anything new. You can! You just have to bring your reader (editor, reviewer) along with you. Build a bridge between where they are and where you’re going!
You ever have to give a pill to a dog and you coat it in peanut better? That’s what you’re doing when you engage with the familiar stuff before getting into the new stuff. You will get more readers, engagement, and citations if you start with what people know/like/recognize.
You want to rip an extant literature up with your piece? Show us that you know that literature–show us how it fails and why it needs fixing before you try to fix it.
You want to show the advantage of a new theory or method, show us how it plays nicely with extant ones.
Something I think a lot of scholars don’t understand: the more generalist the journal, the more generalist a given article’s appeal is supposed to be. What does this mean? 1/
Something focused on advancing our knowledge of an empirical topic goes in a specialist journal. I write something on prisons, I want other scholars interested in prisons to read it. 2/
Something focused on advancing theory or perhaps methodology that can be useful across subfields or topics goes in a generalist journal. I write something that uses prisons as an example, but I want it to be useful to scholars of hospitals, schools, workplaces, neighborhoods,….
You can get a broader audience (more readers, more citations) if you think about what that broader audience can take from your article. If you just focus on your empirical topic, you are narrowing your audience.
We often think of generalist journals as simply more prestigious and having a higher standard. This is often true. But a big factor is whether you are speaking to a generalist audience, not a specialist audience.
Pro tip: You can signal to whom you are speaking in your first three paragraphs (ideally, in your first paragraph). Start broad—what’s something everyone in your field cares about or might have heard about or studied at some point. Then link it to your topic. Build the bridge!
If your opening paragraph is about prison, and not something more general, something you see across contexts, why would someone who doesn’t study prison read your study? We’re busy! We have too much to read! We might not like it, but these are the choices people make.
We get too wrapped up in thinking our work is inherently interesting or important. It is to us. It may be important. But most people only read what is relevant to their research, so show them–hit them over the head with it–how your work is relevant to them.
The other thing I was thinking about during the conference: we need to do better to train students to have a broader focus than their narrow focus on their empirical study alone. I try to do this in Ch. 4 of RQSS, but now here’s a diagram!
Remember to define your terms! Just because you know what a jargon term means doesn’t mean every reader will. Don’t make them look it up–plus, they might find the wrong defn. (How many defns of institution are there?) And what do you mean when you use that term?
This is even more important when writing for an interdisciplinary audience or when writing for folks who aren’t experts in your topical area, theory, or methodology.
I’ve been reading a lot of research lately and I can’t tell you how often people use a gap in the literature to motivate their work. If you go this route, be sure to explain why the gap needs filling. The mere presence of a gap is not motivation enough.
I really, really hate it when people frame papers as X has been understudied, and then the paper doesn’t cite actual papers/books that discuss X. Reason #4338 why gap framing is a bad idea.
It’s okay to use a gap if you explain why the gap matters, but many more interesting ways to frame new research, eg, focusing around a research question investigated with new method, data, lit, theory; re-examining things the field takes for granted; critiquing interps;…
But again, all of these need motivation, too.
As long as it’s well motivated, I don’t object. But the standard gap framing that I’ve seen way too often is simply absence without saying why it matters, what it contributes (and often they’re wrong about the absence in the first place…).
One of the best ways to increase your chances of a successful peer review: circulate your paper to trusted colleagues in the relevant (theoretical, empirical, disciplinary, topical) field(s) BEFORE submitting to a journal. Aim for at least three readers. Plan to revise.
Please pre-circulate your papers to trusted readers. They can catch things you won’t. And not just spelling errors, but real substantive issues.
Better yet: vet your research question and research design BEFORE starting your project to save heartache later.
When writing a revision memo, make sure you answer any editor/reviewer queries in the text of your manuscript and not just in the memo. I always read the ms first and then the memo; if something was just in the memo and not the ms, that’s not good enough.
Bonus tip: When I write articles for LSI or LSR, I try to include a paragraph in the conclusion about what my (US-focused) study has to offer scholars in other countries. Why should they read my piece? How do my findings translate? How generalizable is my work, truly?
When making graphs, remember to use line style differences instead of color differences where possible! Dash, dot, thick, connected (cirlce, square), etc. Reading a grayscale graph with seven lines, all the same style, is so hard!
If you are presenting at @law_soc next week, start planning to submit your resulting manuscript to LSR!
Protips: Frame your paper for a broad sociolegal audience. Reread/proof your paper. Ensure it’s well organized. Circulate it to some trusted colleagues; revise accordingly.
Hey @law_soc folks! Our new “From the Editors” just dropped! You’ll want to read this!
Editors’ notes are a good source of insight into a journal. Journal policies and norms sometimes change when new editors take over, so it’s always good to read what the new editors write.
But we are also being super intentional about our editorship and have adopted an “educational” approach: our goal is to make the norms about publishing as explicit as possible. We want people to have successful peer review experiences!
Here are some highlights! 1) We welcome submissions on topics that LSR hasn’t typically covered (e.g., climate change, disability and public health, Indigeneity and colonialism, technology, etc.). If you study these areas and can put an L&S spin on it, send your ms our way!
2) We now explicitly welcome theory-only articles rather than only theoretically informed empirical research (our traditional gold standard). We want your really well-done theory essays!
3) We are expanding our use of the “reject and resubmit” or “soft reject.” This one can be confusing and perhaps off-putting, but we’re doing it strategically: if we give you a soft reject, it’s because we think your paper has promise and we want it to succeed but…
again, it’s because we think your paper has promise and we want it to succeed, but we worry it won’t get through peer review in one round (our goal). So we send it back to you with our suggestions to speed the process and increase your chances of publication!
4) We’re holding office hours, both virtually during the academic year and in-person at LSA. Please drop in and ask us your questions!
5) We’d love to drop in to your department, center, institute, etc. and give a training session on publishing in LSR. We also have organized a great panel at LSA on publishing in sociolegal journals!
6) The big one: demystifying how this process works. What does it look like when we receive your article? How do we actually go about making a decision? Here’s how:
Something to highlight about that: seeing behind the scenes has been interesting. We’re sometimes in the awkward position of having reviewers say one thing to the author (often very encouraging) and then something else to us confidentially….
So, sometimes it looks like positive reviews, but they actually aren’t so positive. But we also use our own read of the paper (all three of us editors). Sometimes we see things the reviewers missed and sometimes the reviewers see things we missed. Decisions reflect it all.
7) Don’t send us your manuscript before you’ve circulated it to trusted readers. This one is big. Other readers can spot things for you. If you need help finding trusted readers, contact your
@law_soc CRN organizers, ask your mentor/advisor to help, join/create a paper exchange.
8) Make sure your ms looks like an LSR piece. This is true for all journals: you want to use the typical sections and order (typically intro, lit review/theo framework, data and methods, findings, discussion, conclusion). Make sure it’s an L&S topic and uses our lit and theories.
9) Related to that, our key advice: make it clear why you are sending your piece to LSR! We receive a lot of pieces that look like they were written only for a general sociology, criminology, poli sci, etc. audience. Not an interdisciplinary group of Law and Society scholars.
Framing is key! Having a legal topic is not enough. You have to wrap up your baby in the swaddling of our field. The advice I always used was would Laurie Edelman want to read my piece on prisons? (She didn’t study prisons.) How do I make her interested in my piece on prisons?
Laurie has recently passed away, but I still imagine her when I want to frame for a broad L&S audience. Pick your person, your ideal reader–someone who doesn’t study exactly what you do but who is also an L&S scholar. How do you bridge the divide between your topical interests?
This one is key! Framing is always key. It’s like the adult version of the “hook” that we’re told to add in high school or college essays. More cynically, we can think of it as the shibboleth. But really it’s about showing your connection, your contribution, to the broader lit.
We say more about this in our Editors’ note fairly extensively bc it’s so important!
Finally, we’d love it if this could go without saying, but we don’t have a preference for any given topic, method, or country. Importantly, everyone (incl. scholars of the US) should provide enough background on their context that a broad, global readership should understand.
So, those are the highlights and here’s the summary! We’re excited and humbled to be at the helm of this important journal and we welcome your questions, thoughts, insights, and general input!
Okay, this isn’t always taught and people have mixed views on this but don’t simultaneously send out papers for review when they come from the same project! We get too many papers that double dip from the same project without clearly distinct contributions.
For grad students, a lesson I had to learn the hard way: if you have a three-paper project planned, wait for paper 1 to be published before you submit paper 2 for review. Trust me. In fact, don’t write paper 2 until paper 1 is published. Outline, memo, fine. But wait for more.
I wrote three papers in grad school that were never published. Each were distinct papers, different parts of the dataset, different analyses, different but overlapping theoretical frameworks. If I’d focused my energies on paper 1, waited for it to be published,…
…It might have actually been published. And maybe papers 2 and 3 would have too. These were award winning papers, but never published. Don’t learn this lesson the hard way.
And I know there’s a big debate about salami slicing. It’s a little weird that there’s debate over this. But I’ve seen legit scholars send papers that were substantially similar to things they’ve published. Don’t do it. Write distinct contributions.
The only exception is invited chapters and encyclopedia pieces: I try hard to make distinct contributions when I write another piece and another piece on the same slices of penal history, but I may not succeed. But there’s a different norm than with unsolicited PR articles.
The rule I try to follow is mix something up: if you are using the same dataset, use a different theoretical framework; if you’re using the same theoretical framework, make sure you’re using a different slice of the dataset or a different style of analysis. Make them different…
Or at least different enough. Different people will have different standards. Some use stricter standards than I do, others looser. It’s controversial.
Oh, and for the love of god, don’t use almost the same title…. Publishing two articles in peer-reviewed journal with virtually the same title is super suss.
Oh, and if you’re doing qualitative work and you repeat quotations, it’s a good idea to cite your prior work that cited it. If you are citing your prior work more than your original sources, the newer paper may not be original enough.
It would need to make a really strong theoretical contribution to make up for it at some journals (some journals may not mind, but ours does). Again, you want to add something new, like add in a careful analysis of newer secondary literature or a new dataset or a different RQ.
Ashley T. Rubin 