Turning your research into published articles

Contributed by Eoin Magennis

The pressure-cooker world of academia now has two Holy Grails. The monograph has been dealt with by Pue’s before. The other, an article in a peer-reviewed journal, is what I’ve been asked to write about – from the editor’s point of view.

The first thing to say is an obvious point – writing briefly about the topic of your choice is harder than to cover 100 pages on it. Just because this is obvious does not mean that people pay heed. In my five years’ experience of editing Eighteenth-Century Ireland, there is nothing more off-putting than the over-long submission. It won’t mean automatic rejection but if you can’t say what it is you want to say within 10,000 words (including notes) then you are likely to need to do a lot more work.

A second point to make is that articles published today are not what they once were. This is not a case of casting a fond eye back to a golden age of well-crafted articles. Indeed if you go back through old journals you will see how many articles were poorly written, badly argued or both. That said, theses now lend themselves better to extracting articles than they once did, when narrative was more important.