post 2 in the Navigating Academic Publishing series
For the second post of the series Navigating Academic Publishing, I break down what academic publishing “is.” This post operates as a quick orientation to the genre. I cover what scholarship is, how it differs from seminar papers, and how AI/LLMs are influencing publishing.
What is Scholarship?
Scholarship occurs in multiple formats, the most common in the academy are: journal articles, discussions/fora (singular: forum), special issues, book chapters/contributions, and books. There tends to be an implicit hierarchy of preference in some disciplines. For instance, in Communication and Rhetoric, we tend to roughly move from most preferred: books, journal articles, special issues, book chapters, and fora. This is not hard and fast, but something to consider while establishing your scholarly presence. (The majority of an academic’s publishing will occur as journal articles, and is where this guide focuses.)
Something often overlooked in publishing conversations is that, at the end of the day, submitting scholarship is networking. You’re putting your name and ideas in front of audiences you normally might not have access to. While anonymous peer review does not reveal the names of the authors to the reviewers, the reviewers can learn the name(s) should the article be accepted. With the digital nature of publishing now, it can feel like you’re speaking into the void. You’re not, there are people on both ends of the screen; important to remember that. You never know where the lead for a new opportunity can come from; I’ve had conference panels emerge from post-facto learning of reviewer/author information.
Before we get too deep, there’s a handful of roles scholarly publishing involves.
- Authors are the people submitting to the journals, a.k.a. you. These are individuals who have prepared full manuscripts of article-length projects and have submitted them for peer review and possible publication. As we’ll discuss, there are various types of journal articles that can vary, but they’re always authored by someone.
- Editors are the “captain of the ship” at journals. For association journals, the editors are often elected by the association’s legislative assembly or association members. For non-association journals, it can vary how editors are named. There are often different editors for research articles versus book or other reviews. There will also be guest editors for any special issue of the journal. Editors are the arbiters of decisions throughout the publishing process.
- Editorial Assistants or Staff will often aid Editors and can sometimes be your first point of contact.
- Reviewers are scholars with expertise in the submitted work’s area—they tend to be folks who have published on the same or related topics, or they may be people the Ed Staff knows personally in the area. The norm for original research is to assign two (2) anonymous reviewers to a submission. They are given 6 weeks to review the submission (usually), and then offer a decision of acceptance, revisions, or rejection to the editor as well as feedback to the author(s).
- Review essays tend to only be reviewed by the Reviews Editor. Review essays are an excellent way to get a taste of the academic publishing process at first.
- Copy Editors who help polish the sentence-level mechanics and format of the essay for publication once it has been accepted by reviewers and the editor.
Now that we know the players, one of the first differences new scholars have to navigate is the change of genre from “student” writing to “scholarship” proper.
Student-to-Scholar
Very early in my graduate career, I got a conference submission review that said,
“This is more of a seminar paper than a publishable essay.”
My neurodivergence responded, “Well…yeah. It was a seminar paper, and I am not thinking about publishing it yet. And, this is a conference submission portal.” So, I was confused by the feedback. That metaphor, though, haunted me throughout grad school. But what does it mean? How does a seminar paper differ from a publication, specifically a journal article?
In essence, the two genres have very different goals and audiences that may align in theory but do not overlap in practice.
A seminar paper is the culmination of a semester’s learning about a specific topic or area in the discipline. There is going to be a clear “arc” to the material covered. Your citations likely draw from and/or are limited to the reading list of the course. You’re also (even if just implicitly) writing 1) to “the professor of your seminar” rather than “a peer in the area,” and 2) to prove aptitude with the assigned concepts and readings. In a sense, the boiled-down takeaway of a seminar paper will be, “Hey, professor, look! I know what I’m talking about! Here’s an example.” That is the point of the seminar paper, to prove understanding, however a journal article has very different aims.
A journal article, in contrast, seeks to intervene in the ongoing conversations of scholarship in a discipline or area. There might be a less coherent “arc” to the readings/sources, but your article usually seeks to remedy that gap. In an article, you are pulling from an array of venues (across syllabi, for a comparison) to show 1) the existing discourse on an idea, 2) the overlooked or missing parts within that discourse, and 3) your unique intervention into that issue to remedy or prove it needs remedying. The takeaway of a journal article will be, “Hey, fellow scholar, look at this hole we’ve let grow in our field. Here’s how I propose we address that, with an example.” Rather than “proving” you understand something, an article works to teach an original thought/concept to an audience of peers.
Special issues can be a great place to begin moving a seminar paper toward publication as they mirror how grad courses are topic-specific, to a particular area of the discipline. I have this summary of how I moved a seminar paper on Lizzo’s Tiny Desk Concert to publication. In my case, a paper for a class on race, gender, and dis/ability, became my contribution to the Black Love issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly. While not exact, you can often find calls resonant with seminars as a place to move a paper forward.
The AI of it All
As with every other area of mediated life, Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Language Learning/Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming proliferate. Academic publishing is no exception, and publishers (particularly with journal submissions) are beginning to institute policies around AI/LLM. For the most part is it an outright ban on using any non-original writing in submissions and reviews.
That said, AI/LLM offers a helpful accessibility tool for some, and while all text must be original in academic publishing, you can utilize AI/LLM as a tool in some cases. For example, some scholars have shared on social media that they will use AI/LLM for a quick “readability” test. Rather than asking AI/LLM to re/write the text, they are asking it to function as a reader—is what’s written sensical to the average reader of this area of scholarship? Others will use it as an automated Google search or Wikipedia scroll wherein the AI/LLM performs and summarizes a search. An accessibility-forward option would be to ask for re/explanation of concepts for individuals with specific neurodivergences (e.g., “explain this concept for someone with ADHD/dyslexia/etc.”) or to ask for an accessibility check on a document, idea, etc.
AI/LLMs are incredibly flawed as they continue to emerge and evolve. They should never be taken as fact or treated as infallible. Nor should AI/LLMs be authors.
The best way to approach AI/LLM use in academic publishing is to not “cross contaminate.” Anything that is AI/LLM-generated should never appear in files or materials submitted to journals, conferences, or editors unless outright specified in the cover letter.
Further, anything you put into AI/LLM should be your own and no one else’s. AI/LLM sourcing is highly unethical, plagiarizing work without the user’s knowledge and/or the original producer’s consent. Most models of AI are those language learning models, which means their primary function is not rooted in dispensing facts but regurgitating what it has learned from users, the internet, etc. It uses all input from users to achieve these goals.
Most AI/LLMs also are programmed to predispose user satisfaction, not facticity. Most directly, this means that AI/LLMs are highly unlikely to outright correct a user’s mistake or misconception. If you ask AI/LLM to write about Isaac Newton’s theory of relativity, it will not necessarily correct the misattribution (e.g., writing about Albert Einstein’s relativity or Newton’s Laws of Motion), thus producing misinformation. Or, if you upload a draft and ask it to review it for you, it will not necessarily “fact-check” but look more at the composition, grammar, and mechanics of the provided text.
As AI/LLMs continue to evolve and be refined, proceed with caution.
The next post will dive deeper into journal articles themselves, but I’m curious what experience you’ve had so far with publishing and the transition from student writing to scholarship!
Myles W. Mason, PhD 
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