Writing Club Meeting 8

Progress of group members

·         Nara has found an example of a paper that he wrote in his past when he worked for an NGO. He describes his writing style as “dry”. We’ll take a look at this in a future meeting and try to liven it up.

·         Anne has become an Ajarn since our last meeting (congratulations!) She’s now writing a report in English and working on the Centenarian website.

·         Reena attended the regional M&E workshop and has been working on a proposal on cross-border marriage.

·         Jongjit’s paper that we discussed earlier has been accepted at the ACS 2012 conference in Pattaya (congratulations). She will have a progress report presentation of her dissertation on Sept. 14.

·         Suwanya participated in the meeting via skype but did not have a microphone, so we couldn’t hear her. Hope that she can get one by next time.

·         Kerry is working on the special issue of JPSS, she has edited six articles and now has two articles plus the forward to write.

Guest speaker: Aj. Aphichat on “Targeting Journals for Publication”

Aj. Aphichat discussed several considerations for selecting a journal for your research papers:

•       Impact factor: Usually you should aim as high as possible, at least 1.0.

•       On-line and fee: Some journals (such as the online journals) charge as much as $1500. IPSR can help you with these fees if your article is accepted.

•       Journal interest & specialization: Consider the type of articles that a journal publishes, for example how much theory is usually included? Does the journal encourage qualitative work, or not?

•       Journal styles and convenience: Will you have to do a lot of work to have your article conform to the journal format—for example, the references?

•       Your area or your logo career: How do you want to be labeled—as a sociologist? Demographer? Someone who does research on public health?

•       Concentrated: You might want to publish within a narrow range of journals to establish yourself in a field: for example, in demography, in AIDS research, etc.

•       Diversified: You might want to make sure that you publish widely, in different fields. You might be a “duck”: can swim a little, fly a little, walk a little.

•       Romance: You may dream of publishing in a certain journal and aspire to that.

•     Aim high: Don’t be afraid to submit to a very good journal. You will get useful reviews, even if the paper is rejected; you can then improve the article and scale down. The lesser journals may give you a “nonsense” review that is not useful to you.

Aj. Aphichat then told us the history of an article he’s been trying to publish for some time:

The talk was extremely useful for us to think through how to choose a journal, and to remind us to be persistent!