As one of my academic goals for this year, I’m working towards my first peer reviewed academic journal publication. I’m nervous about this for a lot of reasons. I’m still a student, so how could I possibly know what I’m talking about? English is not my first language, so what if I screw up my words or phrase things in a confusing way? What if my paper is rejected because it’s not very good, or worse, what if it’s published and it’s not very good but is attached to me for the rest of my life?
Books have been written about the origins of the peer review system of scientific journals, and more books have been written about all the ways its broken. But before I get to that stage, I want to get feedback on my writing. At the start of that process are the tools I use. I can set my document editor of choice (currently LibreOffice Writer) with the appropriate language settings and remember to use the spelling and grammar checking functionality. The built-in styling option make sure I don’t accidentally end up with one paragraph out of 30 with a different line spacing. My citation manager of choice (currently Zotero) handles most of the mechanics of getting my citation formatting correct.
But tools can only get you so far. Having an intelligent reader take a look at it is necessary for some grammar issues along with things like structural organization and flow, whether arguments are cogent, and so on. And when I say intelligent, I mean intelligent, not a giant pile of statistics held together with duct tape and “AI” stuck to the front on a post-it note. Don’t get me started. Anyway, it just so happens that as a university student, I have a bunch of peers I can ask: my classmates. So I asked some of them if they’d review my work, and got a few takers. Unfortunately, none of them got back to me.
I asked further afield, in a semi-literal sense, by asking friends to take a look even though they aren’t in the same field that I am. I want my writing to be approachable by those outside the field because I feel that writing to the level of people in the field can be exclusionary, and also because it more clearly communicates ideas even to those within the target field. Also, it turns out there are people out there on the internet in my field who are willing to give some early feedback to those just starting to get published. One of those is the Library Writing Cooperative’s First Draft Matchmaker program, and I’ve sent them the current draft of my paper. Their turnaround time is several weeks and there’s no cost. I think it’s amazing that they’re willing to help out students like me.
The journal I intend to submit to is intended for student work, which takes some of the pressure off. But it’s still rigorously peer reviewed as part of the publication process. I’m sure I’ll have more to share about that as I move forward.