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Get Published

This guide is about how to publish in scholarly journals and is specially for new and emerging researchers.

Publishing strategy

A publishing strategy may help you reach better academic publishing goals. It can be considered before, during your writing, and at the stage when an article is completed. The following questions may help you with the design of your publishing strategy.

Where to publish?

Prestigious journal It is good to publish your article in a prestigious journal, keeping in mind that prestigious journals usually take a longer period to assess articles and to process accepted articles due to the large number of submissions.
Professional or general magazines

Will professional groups as well as the public consider your writing interesting? 

  • Consider professional/general magazines and other online publishing spaces. This will allow wider communities to view your article. 
Journals in a specialised research field

Is your research on a very specific research field?

  • Find journals specialised in a particular research field by searching journal information in the database Ulrichsweb.
  • Ask your colleagues or your liaison librarians.
Local or international journals

Does your article focus on the issues that are unique to New Zealand?

  • A New Zealand publication or a publication in Australasia may be the best option.

Open access (OA)

 or Hybrid

OA journals usually engage with wider audience. Publishing in OA journals could increase citations and may have a bigger impact on the research community.

  • Types of Open access publications - which is best for your article?
  • Would you consider the Hybrid OA option for publishing your article in high impact journals?
  • Is the article processing charge (APC) an issue?
  • Check APC fees on publishers' websites or SHERPA RoMEO website.
Conference presentation and proceedings 

Does your article meet the theme of a conference in your research area?

  • Presenting your paper in a conference may lead to publish it in the conference proceedings or a journal.

Other things to consider

PBRF The Performance-Based Research Fund (PBRF) aims to ensure that excellent research in the tertiary education sector is encouraged and rewarded. You can use library databases and other online tools to identify and choose higher impact journals in your field to raise the level of your research impact.
Institutional repository Does the journal allow you to make your article open access in an institutional repository? Search a journal on the RoMEO website to find publisher copyright policies and self-archiving information. Self-archiving in an institutional research repository ("Green OA") has been shown to increase your citations.
Publishing time

Is your research a fast growing topic and is it expected to reach an audience in a short time? 

  • Subscription based journals usually take 4- 20 months to get reviewed. The websites of academic journals should provide information about how submissions are processed.
  • Open Access publishing is a good option to consider.
Avoiding predatory journals Predatory open-access publishing involves charging publication fees to authors without providing the editorial and publishing services associated with legitimate journals.  These are not usually indexed in academic databases (even when they say they are) and therefore will not achieve a high level of citations.

Who is your audience?

Consider who are you writing for: 

  • Local or international
  • Academia or general public, or both

Promote your research

How to promote your publications and get cited?

Your article will only get cited when it can be discovered by other researchers. There are many ways to promote your research and make your research visible to research communities.

  • Archive your articles in Tuwhera (AUT's open research repository)
  • Use online research profiling tools, e.g. Google Scholar Citations, ResearchGate, and ORCID -- Find more options.