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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:

  1. Keep it simple; streamline. The following are ways to incorporate publishing goals into other aspects of my work:
    1. Adapt a chapter from a dissertation or other long work
    2. Use material cut from a longer project
    3. Develop responses to questions that arise during oral defense or presentations
    4. Build new courses around publishable topics
    5. Extract publishable ideas from course development work
  2. 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:
    1. Review journal guides
    2. Study journal indices
    3. Identify frequently cited journals in bibliographic citations
    4. Ask colleagues
  3. The reference librarian is a great resource for simplifying and focusing my research on academic journals.
  4. Queries provide an opportunity to test the waters regarding the viability of a topic for a paper. They can:
    1. Be sent to multiple editors simultaneously
    2. Spark an editor's interest in reading more
    3. Lead to idea refinement, based on editors' responses
  5. Following a positive query response, I can further target my paper by conducting additional journal research:
    1. How are articles titled?
    2. How are abstracts constructed?
    3. How are papers constructed?
    4. 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.

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