Week 4 Finding a journal
Reposted from Lost in the Maze of Languages
Week 4 Day 1& 2 Searching for journals
This week, we’re finally going to decide on which journal we want to submit our paper to. This is something that I have been working on the side of all along but I explored more on my journal choices. According to Belcher (2009)’s categorization of the different types of journal, i.e., regional journals, newer journals, interdisciplinary journals, field journals, and disciplinary journals, I did more research on the journals and I got some recommendations from my writing partner, Keira. I came up with the list of candidates.
Journal of Sociolinguistics
International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism
World Englishes
English Today
ELF Journal
The Asian ELT
Asian Englishes
Modern language Journal
The activity for tomorrow is to evaluate different journals. So I’m going to evaluate these journals and rank them in order based on the fit of my article and the journals.
As for the revision activity, I haven’t done much. I mean I’m working on it but I still found myself going back to the argument. I’ve been debating about this one thing for a few days now and finally emailed the author of the book that I’m mostly basing my study on, asking his opinion. It was quite nerve-wrecking because he might think that my claim and the whole study is not legitimate. But I just had to do it. How could I not, when he wrote a post related to my study on his blog very recently? He might not answer back but I actually feel good about sending him an email. This project is not going as fast as I wanted it, but it is going somewhere at least. I should feel better about it I think.
Week 4 Day 5 Writing a query letter to editors
The task for today was pretty exciting. We’re supposed to send two emails to a managing editor and to an editor of each journal. The email to editorial assistants is about the turn out time from the submission to the decision and from the decision to actual publication. One thing I noticed was that it was not always clear who the managing editor (or editorial assistant) is. I was managed to find the email addresses of editorial assistants of two journals but I couldn’t find the email address of the other one. But luckily the other journal listed all the information about when an article articled was received, accepted, and published in the beginning of each article, so I didn’t really need to email regarding turn around time for that journal.
The second emails were to be sent to the editors of each journal. I drafted a query letter explaining my study and asking whether it would be of interest to the journal. This part was more nerve-wrecking but at the same time really exciting. One thing that I tried to do was to look for articles related to my topic that have been published in each journal and see how my article fit in to the ongoing conversation that the journal has paid attention to. This in fact helped me further solidify my journal decision because definitely one journal seems to be a better fit than others. I’m really excited to find out what they’ll say about my query letters! Or, I’ll be lucky if I hear anything back in time actually.