Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks, Second Edition

Very detailed and thorough reference guide to writing an article for publication

This book’s intended audience encompasses graduate students who are first learning to write and publish papers. It starts with the scenario in which a graduate student wrote a work for a class and needs to revise it for publication in an academic journal. It walks through a twelve-week process to spruce it up for publication. Its approach leans heavily towards the humanities and social sciences, but it attempts to address those of us in the sciences and other quantitative fields as well. Author Wendy Laura Belcher, literature professor at Princeton University, seems to teach lessons she conveys to her graduate students. She does an excellent job in communicating high-quality insights for a large readership. I, however, do not fit her mold as an ideal reader. I have self-trained in my academic field after leaving medical school because of a disability. Although not aspiring to faculty status, I want to publish the results of my technological work. I appreciate the benefit of learning from someone in the humanities because prior experience has taught me that they possess a deeper understanding of human perspectives. The process of publication in any field has human hands all over it. Some of what she wrote frankly doesn’t work for the sciences, especially in my field of biomedical informatics. Fortunately, she explicitly recognizes this, too, in the book. In a short appendix, She addresses those who are starting an academic work from scratch. Another appendix explores how to revise an article after it comes back from peer review, a time fraught with emotion. Reading this book cover-to-cover, I did not follow the author’s advice to practice its writing procedures while I read. I did so because I already have a good discipline of writing and rather need to understand the larger view of how to accomplish this. Her task-analysis helped me see how I need to organize myself over coming weeks. She also helped me fight through some of the inevitable emotions that will come my way. For that, I am grateful. Now, it’s off to polish my looming work before submission…

The book was very good.

This book is phenomenal! Highly recommend if you'd like to keep you research agenda moving forward even during a busy term of teaching and service.

Some background: I earned my Ph.D. just about a year ago, in humanities (art history, but I consider myself interdisciplinary with classical studies). I really struggled during my Ph.D. at times, largely for personal reasons, and I did not manage to publish a peer-reviewed journal article while still a Ph.D. candidate. I am currently in a VAP position and feel like I have a bit more time to focus on publishing things now that my diss. is over with. I bought this book because I was feeling very lost as to what actually constitutes a publishable article. I received little guidance about this stuff in grad school. I am looking to publish material from my dissertation (I also gave the material I'm hoping to publish as a conference paper at the major conference in my field). What I mainly learned from this book is: my article draft is in way better shape than I thought!!! It's honestly surprising to me that people make it to the Ph.D. student level and above, and haven't realized some things by now. For one: that the most important thing for a journal article is that it needs to have an argument. OF COURSE it does!!! Haven't you read a billion of them by now? Haven't you realized that they all have arguments and aren't just reports of what you've learned?! Talking to current colleagues, I learned that this actually is a problem. I'm surprised. Anyway, I'm blowing through this book, at a quicker pace than expected. The main reason it was worth the money, to me, is that I enjoy a structured approach and I find checking off boxes in a workbook to be very motivating. I'm going to send my article off within the next couple months. I'm currently on week 4: finding a journal. Again, I'm baffled: how do people make it to the stage where they're thinking of publishing something, and aren't yet aware of appropriate journals?! Some advice from the book: "Look at your advisor's CV to see where they've published. Look at some of the articles you've cited." I mean...of course!!! I just can't believe some of this stuff isn't obvious to people. Just proves that even at the Ph.D. level, not everyone is "smart" in all the possible definitions of that term...I'm sorry if I sound obnoxious. All my colleagues are very smart people. But nevertheless...a lot of Ph.Ds must be naive, or something.

In my role as Reader and Chair of an International Jury to award Scholarly Articles, I have seen a great need for both editions of Dr. Belcher's book over the years. Her writing is masterful in both and this second edition isn't a retelling of the first. One of the beauties of her workbook is a timeline of 'tasks' that not only encourages rigor (e.g., claims for significance and analyzing evidence) but does so with a tone of humanity, humor and ease of telling stories all writers will recognize! For example, a story from one of her students (paraphrasing), "I was writing and then somehow I found myself sweeping the kitchen floor!" [I am still laughing as I write this review!] Another example is the story of a seasoned writer who literally takes off his belt and ties himself to the desk chair! Oh my goodness ... while I love writing and teaching, I consider both endeavors "giving blood," but these two stories are priceless! A terrific book for all scholarly writers as well as undergraduate students to Masters and Doctoral students. Highly recommend.

Very nice book! Too many pages, but the content is very interesting.

De um jeito leve e estruturado, a autora vai orientando o passo a passo para construir uma boa argumentação e tornar seu texto publicável. A escrita é dividada em etapas menores e tangíveis para concluir a escrita do texto completo de forma mais efetiva. Também promove a construção do hábito de escrever. Estou adorando a experiência de usar esse livro. Gratidão à autora!

Pity I discovered after buying that you cannot read it on my kindle. It can only be read on laptop or iPad.

This is a large book (I didn't check the dimensions). Important, helpful information. Useful. I have the Kindle version, and thought that the book version would be better...the size and weight of the text makes it rather cumbersome.

I have published about 20 peer reviewed articles before buying this book, so not ‘new’ but so many people rave about this book in the writing groups I belong to and wanted to check it out. For a ‘newbie’ I think this would be such a great guide. I have been using it to help with with parts of my writing process when I feel ‘stuck’, but haven’t systematically gone through the timeline as I am working to publish data from my thesis and I find my process is a little different. I’m looking forward to using the step by step approach in my upcoming research project. I’m in education/social science and find there is a good mix of discipline and methods specific advice.