We recently held an online event with series editors and authors from our Psychology of Language Learning and Teaching series about publishing their books, with an opportunity for audience questions at the end. Here’s a taster of one of the questions that was discussed, answered by Ali H. Al-Hoorie and Peter D. MacIntyre.
How do you decide whether to submit an article to an academic journal or mould it into a chapter?
One consideration is preferences in your discipline or university for one format or the other, for purposes of landing a position, then getting promotion and tenure. In the humanities, for example, monographs (books) may be considered more valued than articles, and the reverse may be true in the social sciences. That is not always the case, but each researcher might ask senior colleagues about the relative value placed on different formats.
A second consideration is content-related. The peer review process for articles can be quite strict as a journal has a limited number of pages per issue and a continuous stream of submitted papers. In some cases journals have very high rejection rates (80-90%) so the review process may decline good papers because they don’t fit exactly within the scope of the journal or its preferences (e.g. journals often have preferred methodologies). A chapter, which is often invited by an editor as part of a collection of papers, is more likely to offer the writer a little more freedom to explore ideas. Manuscripts that are theoretical in nature may not be as welcome at a journal that focuses on research papers as they would be in an edited collection. Another consideration is of course the reach of a paper and who you think the most suitable audience is.
You can watch the recording of the event and find out the answers to the rest of the audience questions here:
Channel View Publications and Multilingual Matters 