PRE - CONFERENCE

WRITING FOR HIGH IMPACT : RESEARCH TO PRACTICE

Srikant Sarangi*
Cardiff University, UK

This workshop aims to explore the ways in which ongoing research can be translated into publications in high ranking international journals. Publishing in peer-reviewed international journals is becoming increasingly crucial for individual careers in higher education and for the ranking/funding of universities in general. It is, however, unusually difficult to gain easy access to the working of international journals.

I first delineate the key milestones of the publishing process – beginning with the pre-submission/submission phase, through the peer review and revision phases, to the final editorial decision phase. Each of these phases is directly mediated as much by the researcher as by the editorial procedure, with potential consequences for the eventual outcome: getting or not getting published. Drawing on my long-standing experience as a journal editor across the fields of Text & Talk, Communication & Medicine, and Applied Linguistics, I use illustrative case studies to outline some of the major reasons which underline the negative/positive outcomes as far as novice and non-native researchers are concerned.

I pay particular attention to language-specific, genre-specific and discipline-specific practices and suggest that different journals (editors and reviewers) tend to attribute differential significance to such practices during the publishing process, although this may not become transparent to authors/researchers.

The workshop will be particulalrly relevant for doctoral students and faculty members who have either had some experience in publishing or are intending to publish internationally. Access will be made possible to authentic, anonymised materials (original and revised manuscripts, reviewer reports, author-editor-reviewer correspondeces).

Workshop participants are encouraged to reflect on their publishing experience and disseminate their ongoing research ideas. Leading up to the workshop, it will be helpful if all participants produced abstracts (one/two paragraphs) and extended outlines (no more than a couple of pages) about their current research project/paper. This will give everyone a sense of what others are doing and a selection of these will be discussed during the first day. Participants are also encouraged to nominate a draft article of their own for purposes of peer review (as group work in Day 2).