Part III: Query
Putting it Together
Concept Review
Congratulations! You’ve successfully navigated a critical component in mastering the publishing process! Let’s do a quick review of the key concepts and ideas from this module before moving on to the details of preparing and submitting a manuscript:
- Keep it simple; streamline. The following are ways to incorporate publishing goals into other aspects of my work:
- Adapt a chapter from a dissertation or other long work
- Use material cut from a longer project
- Develop responses to questions that arise during oral defense or presentations
- Build new courses around publishable topics
- Extract publishable ideas from course development work
- Before making a query, it's important to do some initial research on relevant academic journals. Some of the methods I can use to do so include:
- Review journal guides
- Study journal indices
- Identify frequently cited journals in bibliographic citations
- Ask colleagues
- The reference librarian is a great resource for simplifying and focusing my research on academic journals.
- Queries provide an opportunity to test the waters regarding the viability of a topic for a paper. They can:
- Be sent to multiple editors simultaneously
- Spark an editor's interest in reading more
- Lead to idea refinement, based on editors' responses
- Following a positive query response, I can further target my paper by conducting additional journal research:
- How are articles titled?
- How are abstracts constructed?
- How are papers constructed?
- What kinds of supplemental information are included in papers (e.g., graphs, tables, diagrams, etc.)?
Print a copy of this review now.
I was actually approached by one of the journal editors (who was also a colleague at the time) to submit a manuscript describing the outcome of a demonstration project I was working on in virtual reference, so I didn't even have to go through the query phase.
-- Cindy Shamel, author
Congratulations, you've just completed Module 2! Continue with Module 3: Deadlines and Details.

