How to Write a Journal Article (in 6 Steps): Step 6 — Fine Tuning

After writing your conclusion, literature review, empirical evidence and introduction, you have a full article manuscript in hand, and it’s time for some fine tuning before you send it off for peer review to your journal of choice. Fine tuning is really about being deliberate and making sure that the whole manuscript works as a piece of sustained argumentation. More than anything else, you want to make sure that your manuscript is consistent. It doesn’t need to be perfect — peer review is there to get it as close to perfect as it can get — so just make sure it’s 85% complete and that there aren’t any huge gaps.

The biggest challenge in sending a manuscript out for review is coming to terms with it not being 100% complete. But, fundamentally, a manuscript is never done — and it’s up to the peer review process to help you finish it (at least enough for it to be published). An article isn’t a definitive statement, but rather part of an ongoing conversation (or maybe a conversation starter). As such, the burden is just to carry the conversation forward — not to bring it to a conclusion. Accept that an article is never complete, and get ready to send it out for peer review.

With that in mind, here’s the checklist:

1) Make sure that your argument is well articulated and flows throughout the manuscript. Along with that, make sure that keywords that appear in one part of the text appear throughout (e.g. if you’re talking about biopolitics in the conclusion, make sure that it’s in your introduction, lit review and cases). Read it through once on paper or in some other not-easily modified way and take notes on what to fix (editing at your computer can descend into lots of new writing, and you should avoid that at this point). Maybe take a day or two off and read it again. And then sit down to work through the corrections on the manuscript. I tend to find that having someone else read it during this time to be helpful, as I get a little myopic in my reading of my own work after working on it closely for a while. So a fresh reader can be a great asset, especially when it comes to seeing the inner workings of an argument.

2) Verify that there aren’t any non sequitors or holdovers. Hopefully you haven’t done a lot of copying and pasting into the manuscript, which usually increases the number of these kinds of artifacts. In any case, read through the manuscript and make sure that everything you say will be done is actually attended to, and that you don’t make any presumptions of what happened early in the manuscript at late points (look for those telltale ‘as mentioned above…’ and ‘below’). And make sure that you don’t refer to any evidence that isn’t in the manuscript.

3) Check your citations and bibliography. Make sure that everything that should be cited is cited, and that the citations appear in the bibliography. It’s always a headscratcher as a peer reviewer to check a citation that’s unfamiliar to find that it doesn’t appear in the bibliography…

4) Ensure that the manuscript meets the journal’s formatting guidelines. Every journal should have this information posted on their ‘For Authors’ or similar page, including their bibliographic style preference and other style concerns. Make sure you follow these as closely as you can (although sometimes things slip through the cracks — which isn’t anything to worry about), and know that the more closely you can follow them, the more clearly you demonstrate to the editor that you’re serious about publishing in his or her journal and have done your homework. The most important thing here is to make sure that you meet the word limit requirements, usually a little short of target so you have room to revise when it comes time for that.

5) Write your abstract, pick keywords, and write a cover letter. The length of abstracts can vary quite a bit, so make sure you know what you’re shooting for — they tend to be anywhere between 150-250 words. I usually find it helpful to take a summary paragraph from the conclusion of an article manuscript and whittle it down into an abstract. Such a technique ensures that you’re talking about all the things you need to: the argument, the evidence, and the structure of the article. Remember to pick keywords that aren’t in your title (which would be redundant). And prepare a cover letter that briefly states the source (e.g. your dissertation research), intent and word length of the article manuscript. (This all might be worth an additional post…)

If you can, try and do a peer review swap with a friend before you send your article out for review. Make sure that your prospective peer reader is aware of the journal that you’re sending it to and the subdisciplinary or regional debates you’re entering into — you don’t want them to read an article as a ‘general’ reader, since that’s not exactly who you’re writing for. Instead, make sure they’re reading like a specialist. You want to make sure the comments they’re giving you are relevant to your immediate needs, and although a general perspective can be helpful, when you’re targeting a specific journal, such comments can often be a distraction.

So that’s it. Get to work (or keep working), and know that it can be anywhere from 3-12 months to hear back from a journal’s editor. Don’t sit on your hands and wait though, get to work on the next article manuscript…