Where to start and how?
Collect your data, complete your study, written your paper. Now, what should you do?
Trying to publish a research paper in a peer-reviewed journal is important, especially for academics. It's very important that scholars network and communicate, and get their name and work noticed, used, and most importantly cited. To submit a paper to a scholarly or peer-reviewed journal is not easy and might take a long time. To make this process as easy as possible, and improve your odds, all you need to do is:
1- Ask a professor or a specialized person to read, review your paper, check for grammar, spelling errors, typing mistakes, etc. Check the content of your paper, is it presenting a significant issue or not, is it clearly written? keep in mind that it would be good to ask the opinion of non-experts, outsiders perspectives can be valuable to you too.
2- After you get enough reviews for your paper, revise it make necessary changes based on your reviewer's recommendations. Keep revising and checking until you are sure you'll be submitting a clear and engaging paper.
3- Check your chosen journals requirements and specifications for submitting papers and start formatting your paper according to the journal guidelines. Most peer-reviewed journals provide a document on their webpage they call it sometimes "Author's guide" or "instruction to authors" or "guidelines for publishing" etc.
4- When you feel that your paper is ready for submitting, submit your paper through the appropriate channels. It's advisable that you submit your paper to one journal at a time, and when you submit your paper online use an official or university email account, might help to add credibility to your paper.
5- This is when you get a response from the journal. Only a few articles get a quick accept reply from peer-reviewed journals. Peer-reviewed journals replays would likely be one of the following:
- Accept / no mistakes no changes needed (very few papers get this reply)
- Accept to be reviewed / only a few minor changes and corrections need to be made.
- Revise and re-submit / need to make more changes before re-considering.
- Reject and re-submit / rejected, but if the right changes are done might re-consider accepting the paper.
- Reject / not suitable to be published in the journal.
6- After you receive the journal's reply, most of the times you'll be asked to make a few changes to your paper and re-submit it again. What is important at that stage is that you study and read carefully the reviewers comments and suggestions and make the necessary changes.
7- Keep trying to get your paper published, don't give up or be discouraged if you get rejected, a rejected paper does not mean that it's a bad paper. Numerous factors go into determining which papers will be accepted and which will be rejected.
