4.3.1: Using Your Publication Venue to Set Up Your Writing Project

Using the Publication Venue to Set Up Your Writing Project

Create a Structure 

If you completed Course 4, Lesson 1: What and Where to Publish, you learned about the importance of selecting a potential publication venue before you start writing. One effective way to start your project is to create an outline based on your preliminary vision for the article and existing published articles from that venue. Explore the types of outputs a publication venue offers. For example, if it is a journal, does it include both literature reviewLiterature Review The process of summarizing, synthesizing and/or critiquing literature around a specific topic/idea. This work can help a researcher understand what has happened before and also how past research intersects and or diverges from other research. A literature review can be a full-length manuscript or a subsection within a larger research article. articles and original research articles? If you’re working on a book chapter, this may be more challenging. One strategy would be to look at edited volumes from the same press. Similarly, if you’re drafting conference proceedings, consider looking at a previous year’s conference proceedings and finding 1-3 relevant pieces of research that you’d like to emulate.

While you must be able to generally understand the content of the research you’re reading, what’s more important at this stage is finding a structure that you’d like to emulate for your own research. As you’re reading, consider the following:

• What is the general organization (introductionIntroduction The start of a research article providing background information and an overview of the research presented in the article., literature review, methods, resultsResults The section of a research article where researchers share the results from the research. This section takes the results and directly connects them to the research questions or hypotheses posed at the start of the article. Also can be called “Findings.” , limitations, conclusionConclusion The end of a research article that wraps up the work presented. A conclusion can also be a spot to discuss limitations of the research or future avenues for this line of research., references)?
• How does the author flow from section to section or topic to topic? How are subsections used to help the reader navigate the work?
• What works well about how the sections are organized or ordered? What needs to be improved?
• What differences exist between works in this journal or book? Where might you be able to take liberties in the structure of your writing? 

Use this information to create a rough outline for your project. You aren’t married to this outline, and it will inevitably change and shift as you explore your topic in more detail. Starting with major headings will help you organize your thoughts and scaffold the writing process. See Figures 1 and 2 for example outlines and potential headings.

In The Work of Writing: Insights and Strategies for Academics and Professionals, Elizabeth Rankin (2001) encourages writers to consider the purpose of each of these sections instead of seeing them as requirements. Doing so will help you determine scope and, as a result, subheadings. For example, instead of thinking about the literature review as a section that you must have after your introduction, consider how you want the literature review to set up the rest of your work. How will it help guide the reader and foreshadow the presentation of what you’re contributing to the scholarly conversation? How will it demonstrate your expertise to the reader? As an example, in the below outline for an article on library-led courses on undergraduate research and publishing, the author tentatively plans to use the literature review to focus on two specific areas of the literature — scholarly publishing literacy and undergraduate research — and wants to conclude the literature review by capturing the specific gap they are trying to fill by writing this article:

• Introduction
• Literature Review
• Scholarly Publishing Literacy
• History of term

• • • How it has been established in library documents and goals
  • Undergraduate Research
    • Journals
  • • Library publisher involvement
    • Lack of instruction/assessment in this area
    • Description of the Course
      • Course StructureCourse Content
    • Course Activities
      • Peer review activity
      • Others?
• Assessment
  • Assessment design
• • Growth in understanding concepts
  • Where students still need to improve
• Limitations and Next Steps
• Conclusion

Exercise

Complete the following exercise in your LPOL Workbook. This exercise will help you check for learning, engage with the material, and work through new ideas.

Using the 4.3.1: Outlining Your Article worksheet in your LPOL Workbook, write out a tentative outline for an article or other publication similar to the example above. Are there sections you’re thinking about in a new way?

Follow Standards and Conventions 

Once you have formed an outline, look at a publication venue where you’re interested in submitting your work. Maybe this is a venue you identified while taking Course 4, Lesson 1, or a publication you’ve already used to inform you about your work. Refer to the publication’s policies and guidelines to note any standards or conventions they use. While it may seem early in the process to worry about reference styles or image formatting, these details matter and paying attention to them throughout your process will help save you time later. Make note of the following:

• AbstractAbstract The concise summary of a research article that provides a broad overview of the research being presented. requirements (for example, the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication requires a very specific abstract that mirrors the article)
• Reference style
• Word count limits
• Figure/image numbering (i.e. Figure 1.1, Figure 1.2, etc.)
• Image resolution requirements
• Required sections, which will impact the outline that you constructed above (for example, Communications in Information Literacystates the exact headings authors should use in Research Articles) 

Finally, review other articles from this journal or press. Even if it isn’t stated in the guidelines, are there general commonalities in tone or voice? Write down these implicit guidelines as well (Rankin 2001) so that your article is in line with them.

Topic 1 References

Rankin, Elizabeth. The Work of Writing: Insights and Strategies for Academics and Professionals. Jossey-Bass, 2021.