Scholarly Publishing

The third volume in the Short Guides series, Scholarly Publishing focuses on the big picture of publishing for scholarly audiences: Why publish for scholarly readers at all? What are your options? How are different options regarded in the evaluation processes that affect your career? What difference do different options make for potential readers?

The opening chapter clarifies the relationship between scholarly publishing as a means of communicating with other scholars to advance knowledge and scholarly publications as a means of evaluating your scholarship and career. Then I move on to consider how the desired audience influences the choice of form and outlet. The main part of the guide contains a chapter for each of the main types of scholarly publication—books, peer reviewed journal articles, and various types of work-in-progress publishing (conference papers, working papers, etc)—going into more detail about the issues introduced earlier and suggesting particular issues to watch out for. The concluding chapter discusses various methods for improving the discoverability of your publications.

Each chapter has questions to help you apply the information to your own situation. In addition to notes on the sources used in the text, I include suggested further reading on topics not covered in depth.

Scholarly Publishing is a companion volume to the earlier volumes in the Short Guides series. Like the rest of the series, the goal is to help you get unstuck and to formulate more specific questions to ask mentors in your field and institution, colleagues who invite you to contribute to a volume or special issue, and publishers. I’ve kept it short so you can focus on writing and publishing, and structured it so you can dip into specific sections when needed.

Enjoy your writing!