Writing for publication: what nobody tells you – Part 2
Cover letters, access & insights, rejection, cross-cultural conventions & genre, and AI & authorship
Part 2 continues on the tips and tricks when writing for (academic) publication. There is always a political aspect to academic publishing, because of the number of people involved. For starters, you usually have co-authors. At the journal, you will have a lead editor (editor-in-chief, etc.) who does a first triage, followed by an action editor (co-editor, associate or handling editor) who reviews and decided on reviewers (if it is sent out). Two to three reviewers are the norm. So three to four people have views on how your manuscript should be developed, and its your job (and the editor’s) to manage this.
And that is the best case. It is writing by committee.
So below, some more tips & tricks how to navigate this process.
Catch-up service:
What your editor actually needs from you
There is a widely cited piece by Grant and Pollock (2011) in AMJ — “Setting the Hook” — that provides useful guidance on structuring introductions. It identifies four moves: establish why the reader should care about the problem, show what is missing or unresolved in existing work, state precisely what your paper does, and preview what the reader gains. These four moves should fit on three pages, maybe five. If your introduction is still scene-setting on page ten, it is not ready.
Writing openings
The underlying logic is the classic rhetorical structure: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. What do we know? What unsettles it? What does your paper do about that? Booth, Colomb and Williams’s The Craft of Research remains the most practical guide to actually writing this structure into an opening — the exercise they propose of drafting “I am studying X because I want to find out Y, in order to help my reader understand Z” is a useful diagnostic for whether you have a real argument or just a topic. It is not complicated in principle. Learning the art of setting up these openings will get you past the desk reject stage more often.
One thing worth doing: cite the people who might plausibly review your paper in the first three pages. This is not cynical — it is part of demonstrating that you belong in the conversation. Editors use early citation choices as a signal for where to route the paper. Use that.
Don’t forget to set up the research question here - in many management journals, an explicit question is expected.
Research questions flow from research problems. Often, people are taught to identify a gap, but this is not always the most compelling way to set up work. Alvesson and Sandberg (2011) developed an alternative approach, which they termed problematization. This functions as a methodology — problematization as a way to identify and challenge the assumptions underlying the existing literature, rather than merely spotting gaps in it. The distinction matters: gap-spotting produces incremental work; problematization is what produces interesting theory.
The cover letter
The cover letter gets neglected — I am certainly guilty of this. Wiser people than me have pointed out, very reasonably, that the cover letter is where you can make the editor’s job easier:
Summarise the contribution in two or three sentences.
Make the case for fit with this specific journal.
Suggest potential reviewers.
One page. What you are doing is handing the editor the argument they need to send the paper out, rather than desk-rejecting it.
On rejection
We’ve talked about rejection before, and it is inherent in this activity.
After the jump, what the different types of rejection (yes, there is more than one!) mean when you are trying to publish your work.
