Learning and Teaching Unit
Research and scholarship aims to contribute to the resolution of questions or problems of importance to the broader community. Making one's work publicly available is then an integral part of scholarship.
Peer review describes the process by which scholarly work is subject to assessment by experts in the field in order to screen, select, rank or measure performance. Peer review is involved to different degrees in the allocation of research grants, the selection of academic staff and of material for publication, the examination of research theses, as well as the measurement of the research performance of teams and organisations.
Although not without its flaws and critics, the peer review process aims for confidentiality and impartiality. Ethical peer review:
This resource steps through the process for publishing in peer reviewed journals, and outlines ethical conduct within that process.
The first step in the publication process is to clarify your goals. Your goals will change as your research progresses. There are a number of ways in which graduate work can be published. All UniSA students can choose to submit the thesis to the Australian Digital Thesis Program which is an online thesis repository accessible to a worldwide audience. Sections of theses are also published in academic or professional journals or conference proceedings, and some one day become books, although usually in a significantly revised form.
Possible publishing goals include:
Ultimately your aim is to produce a quality piece of research writing that reaches its target audience, and is well received by that audience. Although rejections can be difficult, they are often an important element in eventual success.
Dissemination of research conclusions within public forums beyond the scholarly community should not occur until after the research has been peer reviewed. This is to protect the public from potentially misleading information. If the research has not been subject to peer review and you wish to discuss your findings within a public forum, it is important to clarify that the research is 'in progress' or 'yet to be finalised'.
A thesis publication plan is a document that links specific elements of the thesis with specific journals. Under each chapter or section title, the plan lists the names of specific journals or conferences that will be targeted for review and publication. The plan also includes other important information about the journal's requirements such as deadlines and word limits.
Benefits of a clear publication plan during candidature
Potential problems
The first step in the peer review process is to locate potential journals. At this stage the aim is to develop a list of journals with accompanying information and research profiles. In researching journals the aim is to locate a journal and a readership that would be interested in your work.
There are a number of strategies for finding appropriate journals:
When thinking about potential journals look for a fit between your work and the journal in terms of:
Having composed a list of possible publishers, the next step is to research them in more detail. This will involve visiting the web site and reading back copies of the journal. You can type your key search words into the search option on the journal home page. In many cases just skimming the contents pages will provide enough information to decide whether the journal is relevant or not. If the contents look promising, you can read selected papers in more depth.
In researching the journal the following factors are important:
The aim is to determine whether your work, or some part of it, fits, or can be made to fit, the journal's interests. In the beginning of the research process, familiarising yourself with relevant journals can be enormously helpful in defining your field/s of literature, the central questions underpinning the research, and how you wish to frame the problem area. It can also help to guide your reading.
When you have located a small pool of potential journals and the thesis has begun to develop, you can begin to think about publishing a paper, and, depending upon the amount of publishable material, about which parts of the thesis you want to publish in which journals. Ideally the publication process will support and complement the thesis writing process by providing deadlines and critical feedback on chapters as you go. However, this is not always possible. Do not worry if the material does not fall out as discrete publishable papers. This does not mean your work is inferior in any way.
While you may choose to publish something which will not go into the thesis, it is important not to get too sidetracked from the thesis.
Once you have listed specific journals under specific content areas, ideally with clear titles, it is possible to rank the journals from most to least desirable, or in the order in which you will target them.
Factors to consider when ranking journals:
What is a 'high status' publication?
Journal articles are generally considered more prestigious in the social sciences than book chapters, conference papers or papers published in conference proceedings, although there would be exceptions. Contributors to edited books are usually invited and are not subject to formal peer review. There are many more opportunities to present at a conference than to be published in a journal. Conferences in the social sciences and humanities aim to enable wide participation. Journals are more competitive than edited collections and conferences because they have large numbers of submissions and accept fewer papers for publication. Many journals publish only a small percent of papers they receive.
Some edited books are well regarded, particularly in the humanities. This is usually because the contributors are well respected in their fields and the book is timely and widely distributed, or because there are fewer journals in the area.
Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA)
Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) provides evaluations of research at a discipline level according to research quality and activity. Evaluations are based on a combination of indicators developed on the basis of expert review and advice from the higher education sector. ERA provides research journal rankings for all discipline clusters and conference rankings for selected disciplines. Each journal is ranked and listed in one of four tiers: A+, A, B and C.
Impact factor
The impact factor is another way of assessing journal quality. The impact factor refers to the average frequency with which the articles in the journal are cited in a given year or time period. It is important to remember that the impact factor of a journal in one field relative to a journal in another field is meaningless because of different citation practices, circulation and field sizes. However, journals with a high impact factor within a discipline area are usually considered more prestigious than those lower down the list within the same discipline area. However this is not always the case. There are some well respected journals that are not ranked on impact factor lists, or which are ranked lower on the list, but are held in high esteem and are difficult to get into.
Why 'impact factor' does not always reflect quality:
Notwithstanding the usefulness of measures of 'impact factor', it can say more about popularity than prestige. The impact factor does not quantify the impact of publications within a field of scholarship across time, nor can it quantify the impact of scholarship on people's lives, or on the future.
The final step in the planning process is to contact the editor. You may wish to forward an abstract to see if the journal would be interested in your paper before submitting the entire draft. When preparing drafts be sure to adhere to the writing guidelines stipulated on the journal web site. These usually ask for three or more hard copies of the article, a cover page including the author's name/s, contact details, the title of the article, and the name and contact details of the author designated to deal with correspondence (for articles with more than one author). You might also be asked to supply brief biographies for the author/s.
For the most part, academic readers assume that work offered for publication is new, original, and accurate, unless they are advised otherwise by the author in the text.
Unethical publishing practices:
Research is an original investigation to obtain knowledge or insight. Data integrity is part of the bed rock upon which ethical research rests. Without it we could not come to meaningful conclusions or conduct meaningful research programs. It is a serious breach of research ethics to invent, miscalculate, or plagiarise data (claim someone else's data as one's own). It is unethical to alter, exclude or suppress data or findings. All data of relevance to the research conclusions must be honestly reported.
Data fraud and misdemeanours are likely to be discovered given that researchers are working on similar research problems within limited fields and will quickly query discrepant findings. In order to enable research findings to be checked against the data a number of laws and regulations have been formulated. The Freedom of Information Act, the Privacy Act and the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research. These laws require researchers to keep raw data in secure conditions for a period of five to fifteen years following research and publication.
Data fraud and misdemeanours can be avoided by being as scrupulous and transparent as possible about your research design and data analysis procedures.
Do not fabricate, falsify, or plagiarise data. Report all data relevant to the research conclusions.
It is important to obtain written consent from research participants before publishing the results of data analysis. In most cases consent forms also promise to protect the identity of the participants. This must be scrupulously adhered to within any publications arising from the research. All traces of information that could reveal the identity of the source must be removed in publications.
Honor commitments regarding confidentiality.
A journal paper may only be submitted to one journal at a time. When a journal has declined to publish a paper, the author may then send it to another journal. While this can extend the publication process considerably, and is sometimes frustrating for authors, it serves to prevent duplication, dishonesty and wasted resources. Journal space is extremely limited and duplication of the same publication prevents new work and from being published. It takes staff within editorial offices of journals considerable time and effort to select reviewers and to manage the review process, and reviewers volunteer valuable time to support the peer review process. By sending the same paper to several journals you are wasting the time of the editor and the reviewers and undermining the peer review process. Since many fields are comprised of relatively few experts, it is likely that a paper sent to two or more journals will be sent to the same reviewer. In other words, you can easily be found out. This can lead to a seriously damaged scholarly reputation, as well as disqualification from the journal/s in future.
There is one instance where it is ok to submit the same paper to two journals. That is when a previously published article in one language is translated into a second language and submitted to a second journal.
Do not submit or publish the same article to more than one journal.
In addition to the problem of publishing the same paper twice, there is the associated unethical practice of duplicating key findings, or of 'redundant publication' (Roig, 2006). Redundant publication refers to submitting the same data or substantive ideas to more than one journal without disclosing this to the journal or the reader. Sections of text may be reproduced word for word, the same idea may be published more than once using a different wording, or within a different context, or narrow slices of data may be separated out from the core findings and published separately. Data slicing involves the separate publication of segments of data taken from the same sample, giving the misleading impression that the data came from different samples. Data augmentation is another unethical practice. Data augmentation consists of publishing the results of a study in a journal, and subsequently gathering additional data and publishing that data in a second journal as though it were from another independent study.
These practices misrepresent or magnify results and can thereby lead to false conclusions. In each case, the findings are reproduced unnecessarily and aim to serve the career aspirations of the researcher rather than the research aims of the scholarly community. In order to ensure selection according to merit, it is important that a researcher's publication list reflects actual research achievements.
The best way to avoid duplication is to report findings which make more sense when combined in the same paper (especially when the data sets come from the same sample), and to clearly indicate to editors and readers that the ideas or data have been previously published.
It is not considered redundant publication when key findings are discussed within a conference and published within a conference proceedings, and then significantly expanded and reworded and sent to a journal later on. Exceptions can also be made to allow for the duplication of findings or text within anthologies and other collections.
Do not recycle your own data or substantive ideas without disclosure in the text.
Text recycling is a form of intellectual laziness that involves reproducing sections of your own text from previous publications. This represents a violation of copyright, and can be avoided by scrupulously referring readers to the source of any borrowed text either with direct quotes or by paraphrasing just as you would for any other work.
Do not recycle your own previous writing.
When you sign a copyright agreement, you are transferring ownership of the material over to the publisher. This means it is no longer yours to copy for public dissemination unless you have permission from the copyright holder. In addition to being unethical, publishing the same paper, or sections of the same paper, redundant publication, and data slicing are also an infringement of copyright and are unlawful.
Do I need to obtain permission from the publisher if a section of my thesis has been published and I want to submit my thesis to an online repository?
Yes, if:
Publishing often involves signing over copyright to the publisher. In exchange for bearing the cost of publishing your work, the publisher asks to be given control over where and how the work is printed in future, including uploading on the internet. For the most part this is in order to secure any financial gains flowing from the work. At UniSA online theses are available for open viewing on the Australian Digital Theses (ADT) program, as well as Arrow@UniSA.
In publicly disseminating your work (including submitting it to an online thesis repository) you must get permission from the copyright owner. It is a good idea to discuss this with the publisher at the time of publication. Many contracts allow authors to deposit theses in online repositories, others do not. Read copyright contracts carefully and do not sign away anything you do not have to. Always keep a copy for your records.
If you want to copy less than the whole work, like a section or a paragraph, you need to determine whether it is a ‘substantive’ section. Generally speaking this judgement is determined not by the amount of text reproduced, but by its centrality to the overall work. If you are unsure, check with the copyright owner and secure their permission before reprinting.
Permissions are sought in writing. Email is fine.
The Copyright Act permits ‘fair dealing for the purpose of research or study’. You do not need to obtain permission from publishers to copy published work in your thesis for supervisors and examiners, but check your copyright agreement before distributing to be sure.
Should I make my work publicly available on an online repository if I want to publish from it later?
It is a good idea to submit your work to an online thesis repository. Not only will the work be more accessible, online repositories offer safe, long term storage, and they make plagiarism more difficult. Plagiarism from an unpublished thesis sitting on a dusty shelf is much less likely to be noticed than plagiarism from a publicly available thesis.
At the same time, if a journal deems that the work has already been disseminated to its target audience, they will probably not want to publish it. In most cases, merely submitting a thesis to an online repository will not be considered dissemination to a target audience. However this could change as online repositories become more popular.
It is a good idea to check any prior publication guidelines on journal web sites before submitting your thesis. Note carefully the publishers stipulations and consider how wide the dissemination of your work is likely to be before you submit to the public domain. While all UniSA theses on the ADT program are given open access, the Arrow@UniSA repository allows author's to nominate what level of access they prefer. The author can also choose to withdraw the work from either site at any time.
Of course, this applies not only to online thesis repositories, but to the public dissemination of your work at conferences and other professional forums. It is wise to develop a publication plan early in your candidature and to reserve your substantive findings for targeted, quality publications.
Journals may request that the online thesis depository accesses the work from a link to their web site, or that the thesis version uses a different format from the journal formatting of the work. The journal may also ask that the thesis be taken offline.
Do not publicly disseminate work without the permission of the copyright holder.
Authorship can become unclear when several researchers are involved in the same project. Authorship is defined by the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research (2007) as ‘substantial contributions in some combination' of the following:
The Code notes that ‘the right to authorship is not tied to position or profession and does not depend on whether the contribution was paid for or voluntary. It is not enough to have provided materials or routine technical support, or to have made the measurements on which the publication is based. Substantial intellectual involvement is required'.
Authorship of any publications emerging from the research should be discussed, decisions documented at the beginning of the research project, and submitted to the school of the senior author. All authors must accept or decline authorship in writing. Authors may not be included as authors unless they fulfil the requirements stipulated above. Authorship should be periodically reviewed to reflect developments in the research process.
Do not claim authorship unless you have had substantial intellectual involvement.
All sources of support, both financial and in-kind, must be disclosed within publications to ensure proper acknowledgement, and to avoid potential conflicts of interest. If an individual's name is included in the acknowledgments, the person's consent must be obtained in writing.
Acknowledge all sources of support, both financial and in-kind, and obtain consent before acknowledging individuals.
Publishing the thesis as a book is a good idea when:
Publishers' considerations
If you decide to go ahead, prepare a book proposal.
If accepted ...
Australian Government, National Health and Medical Research Council and Australian Research Council 2007, Australian code for the responsible conduct of research, AGPS, Canberra, viewed February 2008.
Roig, Miguel 2006, Avoiding plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and other questionable writing practices: A guide to ethical writing, viewed February 2008.
This web resource was developed by Wendy Bastalich
