Scientific Journals: A myth worth demystifying

Ana Pereira Roders

When I started my academic life, I preferred scientific conferences over journals. It seemed logical. In both cases, you can publish your papers and go through a peer review process. But only in conferences do you need to present your work face-to-face with your peers and discuss results. Moreover, you would get the bonus of meeting fascinating people, working on similar topics, and sharing memorable moments in new cities, enjoying lifestyle, climate, and gastronomy.

Only later, when applying for post-doc funding and seeing my research proposals rejected repeatedly, I realized that scientific journals were preferred by others and, more importantly, by those funding our academic future. With little experience writing journal articles, my first attempts got my papers rejected. Working in an interdisciplinary field did not help either, whereas in journals focused on cities, I was considered to be addressing heritage too much, and vice-versa. Often, I did not even pass the editor triage!

Committed to making a change, I took the opportunity to launch and edit an interdisciplinary journal in my field, the Journal of Cultural Heritage Management and Sustainable Development, together with the late Dr Ron van Oers. We later realized that even if it was very enriching, the new journal did not help us on our publishing block, as we both felt uncomfortable publishing our work in our journal, except for editorial papers, framing and comparing the papers published per issue.

Having worked behind the scenes on a handful of regular and special issues for over a decade, I understood why others preferred scientific journals over conferences. And how I was wrong with my preference for publishing in scientific conferences. I still join and even co-organize them with my team, but I now see them as a first step in publishing.

When you learn to take it to your advantage, the peer review of a scientific journal can be a most enriching process and considerably improve the quality of your work. I seldom rejected papers as editor. Only when they would not include references or be focused outside the journal's scope. Good or bad, all papers can benefit from the reviewers' feedback.

I always motivated the authors to see beyond the reviewer's feedback and improve their paper's quality. Even when the paper is rejected! It might need further work, but you may also have submitted to the wrong journal. So, check your reference list and opt to start publishing in journals that have already published on your topic. You can count on longer review processes and higher rejection rates if you start with other journals.

Managing the feedback of reviewers can be pretty emotional, especially in your first papers. But do not feel discouraged. Take it to your advantage and use most feedback to improve the quality of your work. Let me tell you how you best can do it, an easy trick I share with students and colleagues, whenever I can. Classify all feedback in four action categories:

1- Change it! I agree with the feedback and can easily change it.

2- Discuss your research limitations and recommend further research! I agree with the feedback but cannot easily change it. It would require whole new research.

3- Rephrase and complement were needed! I disagree with the feedback, and it seems that the reviewer misunderstood what I wrote or misread the related paragraphs. Keep in mind that different disciplines may use similar jargon differently. Your audience must understand your work, independent from their disciplines.

4- Ignore! I fundamentally disagree with the feedback. Do not write a 2-pager to the editor. Take distance and accept people with different interests and expertise. Everyone is biased by their discipline, education, culture and context.

I hope this first blog helps you and your academic writing flourish. There is much to say about scientific journals. This blog was just an appetizer. Please leave a message if you have questions or want to know more about these and other topics I might be familiar with.

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