During my recent IHS webcast and post on being a public intellectual and getting involved with the media, I suggested a few strategies for getting started. Here’s an example of a versatile issue where everyone can get involved: government financing for stadiums and arenas. They very clearly benefit special interests, but research by economists like Dennis Coates and Brad Humphreys suggests that [...]

Over at his blog, Kids Prefer Cheese, Mike Munger lays down the numbers on writing, publishing articles, tenure, and how this all relates to salary. It takes two journal articles per year to get tenure.  Good journals.  Not great journals.  If you can publish in great journals you can get away with fewer publications.  But barring consistent genius, you should [...]

In an older blog post on EconLog, Bryan Caplan lays out some guidelines for writing non-fiction that other people will actually want to read. This is great advice to think about when writing for broader audiences as a public intellectual, but it is just as important for academic writing: 1. Pick an important topic.  If someone asks you, “What are [...]

Finding the right journal for your article can make the difference between fame and obscurity.  At the very least, it can make a difference in signaling the quality of your work.  Many scholars (especially grad students) make the mistake of aiming their papers too low.  Fear of rejection is not a valid excuse for doing this – everyone gets rejected, and [...]

The LSE Public Policy Group has a very helpful guide called “Maximizing the Impacts of Your Research.” I wanted to focus on one key takeaway from Chapter 4: good titles and abstracts are keys to getting cited more frequently, and scholars are typically lousy at creating good titles and abstracts. It’s great if you have a bunch of publications in [...]

For every article you submit, it’s always a good idea to have a prioritized list of journals you want to submit it to. If your optimal preference rejects your article, in many cases it makes sense simply to turn around and send the article to the next journal on your list. This strategy is wise especially in cases where you [...]

The article you spent countless hours writing, revising, and altering has been under review for five or more months at a good journal.  You’ve been waiting anxiously for a response, imagining how pretty that journal would look as a publication line on your CV.  You’re proud of this article and can’t think of any reason why it would warrant less [...]

Dr. Art Carden (@artcarden) shares some motivational advice on overcoming one of the most difficult barriers to publishing, submitting it. One of the barriers to publishing scholarly articles is the conviction that a paper has to be perfect before you can submit it to a journal. It’s a vice of my own: I have far too many papers in various [...]

You will need to be published in mainstream journals within your discipline if your goal is a tenure-track professorship. Journals specializing in classical liberal topics are typically seen as marginal by mainstream scholars and, frankly, the articles in these outlets tend not be very good. A CV that mostly has publication lines indicating such journals might be seen as worse [...]

I talk with Dr. Phil Magness about the submission process and general guidelines for History journals.    Jeanne Hoffman: Welcome to this Kosmos Online Podcast. I’m Jeanne Hoffman. Today I am speaking with IHS program officer Dr. Phil Magness about article writing and submission to history journals, as part of our series on article writing and submission to disciplinary journals. [...]